KEY POINTS:
At only 700sq m Colette hardly leaves room to swing a Birkin on Saturday mornings when it's full.
Express admiration for Colette and nobody with a passing interest in fashion or style will think that you are referring to the great French writer. Such is the towering reputation of this Paris boutique, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.
The cooler-than-thou shop merges art gallery, fashion store and restaurant with select beauty, design, hard-to-find magazines, sportswear, design toys and music products. They are all chosen with a hip discernment that intimidates as many as it impresses.
It is infamous for its well-stocked basement water bar of mineral waters from around the world as as well as for its uncompromising choice of fashion labels, from Alaia to YSL, many of whom produce special pieces for the store.
Browsing in Colette is like visiting an art gallery. Although goods are wildly eclectic, they are displayed with an economy that suggests limited stock.
If that sounds torturous, it's true that Colette has, over the past decade, set the standard for hip boutiques. Yet it has a sense of humour: on Monday nights, the shop holds a dance class, at which Parisians can practise MC Hammer or Krump moves.
Crucially, there are no branches elsewhere, although since 2001, a website, colette.fr, hosted by the store's animated canine mascots, Caperino & Peperone, has sold the concept online.
Behind the boutique are Colette Roussaux and her daughter Sarah Lerfel.
"For us, Colette means nothing. It's about the designers we represent," says Lerfel, although she adds that the selection of products in the shop is very personal, absolutely subjective.
Colette is on a corner of the rue Saint-Honore, a stretch that, a decade ago, was home to nothing more cutting-edge than tourist-trap shops selling lingerie and chocolates. From the outside, Colette doesn't look like much.
At only 700sq m Colette hardly leaves room to swing a Birkin on Saturday mornings when it's full of nervous browsers and Japanese tourists.
"It was actually when we saw the space that we had the idea to have a restaurant, gallery, and fashion and design. From the beginning, we just selected what we liked," says Lerfel, who emphasises that a fast turnaround in stock on display, and mixing labels such as Prada and Lanvin with up-and-coming designers, are the tenets of the Colette approach.
"At first," she says, "many of the big labels, who maintain freakish control over their merchandise in department stores, didn't understand what we were trying to do."
A decade on, they clamour to be on the minimally decorated first-floor womenswear section of Colette, where outfits are carefully styled on mannequins and price tags hard to find.
Adrian Joffe, president of Comme des Garcons, was convinced by their unconventional project from the outset, agreeing to be stocked at Colette before it even existed.
"They said they were going to build a revolutionary store in Paris. They showed me plans and explained the concept, and I believed them. I'd never sold to anyone who didn't yet have a shop!"
Comme des Garcons is also one of the many labels to have produced one-off items with Colette, with Cartier, Lacoste, Linda Farrow, Lucien Pellat-Finet and Repetto.
Although Colette is now the most famous gallery-shop, it is not the first.
"The Japanese have the best term for this type of retailing, a select shop," says Tyler Brule, editor-in-chief of Monocle magazine.
Exquisitely edited stores have been around for a long time, but Colette cut through the rest in two ways. First, it mixed fashion, media and beauty, which is all portable and all makes a statement. Second, it stocks the one-offs.
As far as Colette's antecedents go, in London, Biba was the best known of the lifestyle boutiques of the 1960s, uniting fashion, beauty and homeware.
"Before, there were boutiques like that in Paris in the 1930s," says Jane Audas, a curator specialising in retail design.
They would commission artists to do one-off pieces, as Colette does. Displaying just one or two items implies exclusivity.
"Colette is a lifestyle shop," says Audas, "but you don't know what kind of lifestyle you're buying into. Its strength is that it never defines it, it's like an avatar. It lets its products define it."
The low personal profile of Lerfel and her mother, who are hardly ever photographed, supports this approach. Customers must work out for themselves if they are the Colette type. "You either get it or you don't," says Audas.
It is in the shop's uncompromising choice of fashion labels that Colette's personality is stamped most clearly.
Lerfel says she chooses clothes as a fashion editor would, picking the less wearable, directional pieces that make a great photograph rather than as a conventional department-store fashion buyer might.
"From the beginning, we worked a bit like a magazine; we wanted to mix things up, like in a fashion shoot. It's the way people wear fashion today. I would never order something like black trousers just because they're easier to sell.
"I'll see something, and the next week we have it in the shop. It's difficult for other shops to copy this.
"Colette is about attracting a mix of people," says Lerfel. "Those from the provinces who visit just to see what we're about, and those who want to find the latest mobile phone."
Into what new territories does Colette plan to expand, for its next decade?
"Don't expect the obvious. If we had the space, I'd like to have a proper food section," muses Lerfel. Nice fruit and vegetables.
- INDEPENDENT
