Faksimile fra Financial Times oktober 2024.
One of the most photographed crowds at this season’s Paris Fashion Week was the queue outside The Row’s new store, snaking around the corner on rue du Mont Thabor towards the Tuileries. It’s still there, with an all-weather wait for customers who want access to the Olsen twins’ £4,000 cashmere jackets. Mark Quinn, founder of buying agency and retail consultancy Baluba, was passing between shows and spotted a friend in line. “She was embarrassed to see me,” he says. “She had been there for 25 minutes. Someone else I know mentioned a 50-minute wait to get into Chanel the day before.” This is not a new phenomenon. I remember being bewildered by long queues in Hong Kong 20 years ago and, back in the early 1990s, Voyage — the hot boho label of its era — had a door policy at its Fulham Road store in London that generated column inches as much as curiosity and exclusivity. Today, the queue has become omnipresent internationally. When visiting Rimowa on New Bond Street recently to pick up a repaired suitcase, I was asked to wait before entering. After leaving, I made notes on the queues elsewhere in Mayfair. Prada’s was predictably sizeable. Seeing one at Vivienne Westwood on Conduit Street felt antithetical to the late designer’s anarchic ideology. Many other luxury brands, including Kering- and LVMH-owned labels, as well as indie luxury labels such as Goyard, ask you to wait your turn until a sales assistant is available to escort you through the door. Why? Apart from being a security strategy (overcrowding makes shoplifters more difficult to spot), is it being used to create an illusion of hype and exclusivity? There’s more nuance to it than that. “Many brands have made the calculation that matching visitors to a sales associate, while generating queues, is desirable, as it provides higher conversion and ‘hurts’ more casual potential customers,” says Luca Solca, senior analyst at Bernstein. Brands want superfans, not browsers. There are also other factors at play. Last year, fashion tech company Retviews surveyed the difference in price between identical luxury items in Europe and China. Central to the report: the Celine Cabas Triomphe bag, 41 per cent more expensive in Beijing than Paris. For many Chinese tourists, stores on Avenue Montaigne have the appeal of a sample sale. See also: Eurostar travellers returning from Gare du Nord to St Pancras International, laden with shopping bags. Ever since the UK scrapped VAT tax refunds for foreign visitors in 2021, London has lost a lot of lustre for international luxury consumers. But for non-EU passport holders in Paris, including Brits, anything more than €100 is effectively discounted. And people will queue for a bargain.
I contacted several brands about the logistics of their door policies for this story. Most ghosted me, but some explained in detail; the team at Westwood activates a queueing system only during particularly busy periods, because many customers are shopping for jewellery, which is displayed within cabinets, necessitating one-on-one service. A spokesperson for Louis Vuitton in London told me that its one-to-one service is now standard, to offer each client “the most tailored approach”. The Paris-based publicist for The Row replied with a succinct email that landed like the sound of a door slamming: “Thank you for your interest. The Row will not participate on this.” There are a few retailers bewildered by their own queues. You can order anything from beauty and fragrance brand Officine Universelle Buly online, but every Saturday in Paris there’s a 90-minute to two-hour wait to get into its rue Bonaparte store. The remarkable vintage-looking apothecary interior makes it worth the wait. “We tell people that there are smaller queues at our other locations,” says co-founder and head of marketing Victoire de Taillac. “But it’s become like a Parisian pilgrimage to buy a lip balm or comb over the past two years.”
More bizarre are queues that seem purely performative. There are frequently lines at Canada Goose on Regent Street, but the vast corner windows sometimes expose the empty shop floor inside. Helen Lambert of retail consultancy Style Pulse sees the practice as a potential brand killer when it’s not justified. “There is a difference between making customers wait to have a remarkable experience in the store and making people wait just to create buzz while the store is empty inside,” she says. A friend of mine reported experiencing the latter scenario at Loewe in LA over the summer (but still spent substantial sums once inside). Another, Caz Facey, director of ING Media, found herself with time to kill in Milan between meetings, so headed to Prada, something she used to do regularly in the past. “My experience — five minutes in a queue and then passive surveillance from sales associates for 15 minutes — left me completely alienated from a brand I used to love.” Some door policies might have dubious intent. I recall in 2003 visiting the London flagship of a major Japanese designer. Ahead of me were three Black men, who were told via gesticulation through the glass door that the shop was closed. They walked away. I was beckoned in. Even in the 2020s, there’s still prejudice. Reality TV personality Bethenny Frankel was barred from entering Chanel in Chicago this May when she turned up, as she explained, “in a sweaty T-shirt and not dolled up or looking wealthy”. The next afternoon, she filmed herself dressed smartly being welcomed inside. It made news internationally. So where is this all going? Will there be a tipping point for the queue? Some high-end retailers have gone in a totally different direction. 10 Corso Como in Milan remains an open-house concept store, as do the international branches of Dover Street Market. Both have cafés and bars to reinforce the idea of them as social spaces. “Our hope is to be welcoming and inclusive to everyone who walks through our doors,” says Dickon Bowden, vice-president of Dover Street Market. “It’s about coming together, interaction and community. I think in the future we will see a reversion to rediscovery and deeper appreciation for the importance of physical retail.” I ask Bowden if he thinks this means the end of the queue. There’s no wait for his answer: “I hope so!”
Fra spøk til alvor, det er ikke Bjerke som har bestemt dette, men Rolex. Bjerke blir pent nødt til å følge reglene dersom de skal få fortsette å selge Rolex.
