In your face sustainability - pop-up changes the fashion landscape

Comme des Garçons pop-up store in Paris' trendy Haut-Marais district (7, rue du Perche)


The first ever brand to come up with this pop-up strategy was the Japanese luxury fashion label Comme des Garçons, which is said to have invented this Guerrilla marketing strategy by opening up a temporary store in Berlin in 2004 to display Junya Watanabe's designs in a totally fresh environment. Over the years, more than 20 CDG stores followed worldwide in cities like Barcelona, Warsaw, LA, Singapore, Glasgow, Hong Kong, Paris and many more. This creative concept has been adopted over the years by quite a few other brands as well and therefore, unusual locations like boat piers, old storage buildings, galleries, garages or clubhouses have been modified and used as an unusual showroom. (guerrilla-store.com)

Creating scarcity in a world of abundance very often does the trick these days. After all, what is there that we cannot get one way or another?! Where generations before us struggled and finally celebrated the rare delicacies or scarce materials, clothes and accessories, we take it for granted that we can have most of the goods we're after relatively quickly in our trusted big scale department stores, which nurture the latest international talents - or simply by good old e-commerce.
This abundance certainly has a long list of reasons, economy of wealth, globalisation just to name a few of them.
But does our psyche really work that way - if it is rare or at least seems rare - I have to have it? Is it our everlasting will to impress our environment? Or does it make us feel special if we wear something that is perceived as rare/difficult to obtain? Is it the expiry date of the pop-up store that makes us go all excited about it? I mean, obviously, one could argue if fashion has an expiry date - I quote Yves Saint Laurent most-used sentence here who famously argued that " Fashions fade, style is eternal". Yeah - I could not agree more with that. But sometimes in our "been there done that" - world, it really is exciting to us being challenged by new concepts and having our senses spoilt by the unusual. The fact that we adore fake scarcity might be a bit weird, but after all, we do live in a world, where abundance is blurring our day-to-day routines.

xoxo
Glamazone