Colette Built a Concept Store No One Could Copy. What Did It Do Every Day for 20 Years?

People saw it as “the end of an era.”

News that Colette would close at the end of 2017 stunned everyone who had ever heard of the concept store.

It retired at the height of its fame, for a reason that turned out to be very simple: “Colette Rousseaux has reached the point where she needs time to properly enjoy herself — and without Colette, there is no reason for Colette to exist.”

2017 happened to be Colette's twentieth year in business. In 1997, Colette Rousseaux, a single mother, and her daughter Sarah Andelman, fresh out of art school, found a building on a corner of Rue Saint-Honoré and filled its 8,000 square feet with art, design, fashion, and food. Rousseaux ran everything behind the scenes, including the business side; Andelman took charge of creative work, buying, and public relations. Here you could buy things sold nowhere else in France, see the newest things first, and, in Paris, still get lunch at three in the afternoon. Monday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., the same for 20 years — and the fashion world, which tires of everything, never tired of it.

Rue Saint-Honoré has since gone from “no man's land” to one of the most expensive streets in Paris. Nearly every French fashion house has a shop there now; it has become the city's shopping center, with rents above 10,000 euros per square meter.

“It's the only shop I go to, because you can't find what they have anywhere else. I've bought watches, phones, jewelry there — basically everything! They invented a formula for success that others can't copy,” Karl Lagerfeld said, in a line that has been quoted countless times.

Colette Rousseaux's father was a fishmonger, and she liked business too. After divorcing Sarah's father, she started selling clothes to make a living. This was the early 1980s; the shop was called Polo, on Rue d'Aboukir in Sentier, a district in the second arrondissement. It grew quickly, and even buyers from the provinces came there to stock up.

But Rousseaux had always planned that once her daughter finished at the École du Louvre the two of them would work together. She knew Sarah didn't want to stay in Sentier and would rather sell art books, so she sold Polo — while keeping the designer Milan Vukmirovic on as a co-founder of the second shop, Colette.

Search the name Milan Vukmirovic years later and you find his influence spread widely through fashion. This Serbian-born Frenchman left Colette to become head designer at Gucci (under Tom Ford), and was also creative director at Jil Sander. In 2006 he became editor-in-chief of L'Officiel Hommes; in 2007, on top of that job, he took on the creative director's post at Trussardi 1911.

The energy of Rousseaux and her daughter took another form. Rousseaux lived above the shop for all 20 years. Every night mother and daughter dressed the mannequins together and cleaned the shop themselves. Every Saturday, the moment the doors closed, Colette would begin stripping out the interior and repainting the walls; all of Sunday went into preparing the next week's Colette. Twenty years, not a day off.

Almost every week Colette put on a brand event of some kind: book launches, band performances, co-branded releases, panel discussions on sneaker culture, doodling sessions for children — each one original, each one a surprise. That jaw-dropping level of activity became a kind of guarantee: shoppers knew they would find something new, and brands knew this was the best place to find an idea worth collaborating on.

Where did the energy come from? Why, 20 years on, have so many concept stores either sunk into the chain-store swamp or faded into the ordinary, while Colette stayed strong to the day it retired? Was its appeal only that of one colorful little shop, or did it mean something larger?

Understand this and you understand why it couldn't be copied. You also understand why, once Colette Rousseaux wanted to rest, closing Colette was the most natural thing in the world.

1. Control

“One thing that really matters, I think, is that we don't have to ask anyone about what we want to do,” Rousseaux said. “If we want to paint the shop blue or green, we talk about it for a minute or two and then we do it. I think that's our secret: the ability to act, and an unspoken understanding between us.”

An extremely simple structure is the key to acting fast. Bring in a third party and you give up some flexibility and independence, and make every decision more complicated. 10 Corso Como, which Carla Sozzani founded in Milan, was every bit as famous, but its moves into Beijing and Shanghai went nowhere because the local partners weren't up to the job. In Beijing, to cover daily running costs, the partner even began adding more mass-market goods, drifting away from the original idea.

The more parties with a stake, the more elaborate the system you need. Colette stayed independent throughout and so avoided the principal-agent problem; Rousseaux and Andelman kept absolute control, which is what guaranteed fast decisions. But the hardest part was never control. It was the resolve to give up expansion.

2. “We Couldn't Do the Same Thing Anywhere Else in the World — Not Even Across the Street”

Had Colette wanted a second location, investors would have lined up to partner with it. But Sarah always insisted there would be only one Colette: “The reason we opened the shop in the first place was to bring Paris something it was missing... We're a very small team, and we love and chase detail. We couldn't do the same thing anywhere else in the world. That's why we never opened a second store.”

The decision is startling, especially when you remember that Colette grew up in the late 1990s, at the peak of global expansion and group consolidation in fashion, with Paris at the center of it. Set a behemoth like LVMH aside, and going global was still the strategy nearly everyone else in the business chose.

10 Corso Como appeared in the same era as Colette — it was founded in 1990 — and expanded from Milan to Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing, and New York. Rei Kawakubo's Dover Street Market and Lane Crawford also leaned on group capital to buy inventory outright and enter new markets.

Maybe Colette simply loved control more than it wanted scale.

3. Open to Everyone

Colette's shop design, its displays, and the goods it chose never struck a lofty pose. It is hard to name a French fashion house that never worked with Colette; the store dealt with more big names than anyone could count. Yet unlike so many retailers, Colette never trumpeted the fact, let alone printed the photographs and hung them on the walls.

The restaurant is reasonably priced, and there is a line at every mealtime. “We never wanted to attract only the fashion crowd. We thought of the store as a place where people meet and gather,” Sarah said.

For its 20th anniversary Colette held to the same idea, working with the Brooklyn design studio Snarkitecture on a sea of white plastic balls at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, which anyone could come and play in.

Pulling that off probably owes something to the way Paris teaches fashion to everyone. A relaxed attitude that adds up, without trying, to an elegant one: that is Paris's alone. In another market, a concept store that set out to be “open to everyone” would be laughed at as naïve.

4. It Dared to Be Open to Everyone Because It Set Out to Fill a Gap in Paris

Many people think Colette stood for the refinement of Paris fashion. That isn't quite right, because the place never aimed at refinement in the traditional sense. Instead of the flawlessness other fashion brands chase, it chased curiosity.

From the 1960s on, new designers rose in London, New York, Milan, and Tokyo, the French fashion industry's voice kept shrinking, and French fashion houses began to wobble. Colette opened against that backdrop and brought a great deal into France that the country had not seen: it was the first to introduce foreign brands such as Supreme and Kiehl's, and it combed the world for good things. It kept a tight limit on how much of anything it bought, and no limit at all on variety; Sarah once estimated that a single floor could hold as many as 20,000 different products.

5. “It Took a Lot of Nerve to Do What You're Describing”

That is what WWD said in its appraisal of Colette, and Sarah denied it. Every collaboration worked the way the first ones had, she said: “We call them up.”

“It was like when Apple launched the iPod — I felt I absolutely had to have it. Even now I still find people before they find me. With fashion brands it's easy, because they need a point of sale in Paris, and the traditional department stores still do things the old way; plenty of brands want nothing more than a place to sell in Paris.”

“I don't think it's a question of nerve. We placed orders and bought their goods. That was good for them. Our concept was still fairly new at the time. We had to explain: ‘You won't get a corner with your name on it — we're going to mix all the products together.’ So it took a little time to convince them. My memory isn't good, because we did so many things, but I remember that their curiosity outweighed their wariness.”

6. Mixing It Up: The Shop's Winning Formula

“The magic is in the mix.” Luxury ready-to-wear next to street brands — Colette had that from its first day in 1997. Sarah always compared Colette to a magazine, with the buyers working like editors to set the tone of the whole store. “When we're choosing, we never try to catch up with a trend. The logic behind every buying decision is, ‘this is an interesting story,’” Sarah explained.

So a big floor lamp stands beside a bicycle picked up secondhand in Japan, and a Uniqlo collaboration sits next to the newest Chanel — where a traditional concept store usually divides the floor up by brand.

Colette's ground floor was densely packed, with the feel of a general store: magazines, cosmetics, music, sneakers, T-shirts, and a dazzle of small things, from pencils costing a few euros to watches costing tens of thousands. The second floor held designer clothing, with plain white walls, racks, and cases; the clothes were shown as complete outfits, answering the small gallery space beside them. The water bar and restaurant in the basement used ordinary white fast-food tables and chairs, but the backdrop and the decoration were always changing.

Nobody praised Colette's shop design itself, but people did talk about the interesting, cool things inside it.

7. All of It Had to Be Done Fast

Unlike the many boutique brands that preach “slow living” — and live that way themselves — fashion is in fact a test of speed, because it has to sell refinement and freshness at the same time.

“We're always changing. We never assume that because a brand is doing well, or a thing is selling well, it will go on forever. We don't relax because we've succeeded. To keep surprising our customers we're always challenging ourselves. We try to know about everything a step ahead of everyone else, and we try to have things you can't buy anywhere else,” Sarah said when asked how Colette had kept its influence for 20 years.

Colette moved at the speed of Zara, updating every week. Even when the goods were the same as the week before, it changed the way they were displayed — and beyond that, the windows, the layout, the exhibitions in the gallery space, and the basement restaurant were different every single week. Very few concept stores could turn themselves over at that pace.

8. Incubating New Ideas

Being chosen by Colette didn't only mean the fashion world would notice you. It meant fashion shoppers everywhere would accept you. So the store also took on the work of incubating new designers.

“My relationship with Colette defined my career,” said Virgil Abloh, who runs Off-White. “Without Colette there would be no Off-White. Sarah and Colette have supported my brand, and me as a designer, for more than ten years.” Colette was the first concept store to place an order with Off-White, and the first to put on an event for it.

“If it's something they believe in, they'll back it no matter the risk,” said James Joyce, who thought Sarah took a real risk in giving him a show, handing the store over to him, and making products with him. Joyce is an illustrator with a humorous, spare line. Sarah noticed him because of the “yellow face” he made for Banksy's Dismaland; after a few minutes of talk at an exhibition, she invited him to work together on the spot.

9. Crossovers, Many and Varied

“We were thrilled that the 20th-anniversary Nike shoes we made sold out within 24 hours. We made 213 pairs, to match our address, 213 Rue Saint-Honoré.

Doing an updated version of the Brides de Gala scarf with Hermès felt wonderful — we were lucky to revisit a design that classic, and it sold well too.

Another one worth mentioning is the macarons we did with Ladurée. They do that sort of thing all the time now, but at the time it felt special.

We also worked with Cartier, which carries a great deal of prestige, but I found it gave me the same satisfaction as introducing a new artist to people in a fanzine.

Obviously the pop-up we did with Chanel made an impression.

And putting out a pair of Adidas Stan Smiths with our blue polka dots on them felt great as well.”

Colette's list of crossover partners was long and varied — and it really did pull all of it off.

10. The Details Were Right Everywhere

Colette took its name from its founder, Colette Rousseaux; saying it feels like calling a friend. The logo is two small blue dots. Pantone 293C blue came to be called Colette blue, and a fig scent made for the shop was the smell of Colette.

In 2016 Colette's revenue reached 28 million euros, about 20% of it online.

Colette's website kept the same pace of updates as the shop. Among its music-radio channels was one called Colette Live, which played whatever was playing in the store, in real time. In the bottom-left corner of the site the store's status updated in step: “We Are Open” in green, or, in blue text the same color as the background, “We have closed at...” Small details like these gave people a strange sense of being joined across time and space.

You could subscribe to Colette and choose to receive a weekly or a monthly shopping guide, telling you what had just arrived and what events were on.

11. Judged by Creativity, Not by Brand Pedigree

“We wanted to put together the fashion things we loved. We wanted the big, established brands, from Comme des Garçons to Prada, and we wanted young designers too, like Jeremy Scott, whose work we carried from the first day,” Sarah said.

New and old, luxury and street, expensive and cheap: what Colette broke was not only the convention of displaying goods by brand. More important, it broke the class divisions and the stereotypes behind fashion, and built a new order in which creativity alone decided rank. In a city where fashion stands for power, that mattered — Colette became the symbol of “freedom” inside the Paris fashion system.

As one review in the Financial Times put it, “One reason for Colette's success is that they never took themselves too seriously.”

12. When You Want to Say Goodbye, You Can Say Goodbye

“I'll go on doing what I do now — curating ideas, working on different projects with different brands. Life goes on, and the most important thing is that we're all healthy,” Sarah said in an interview after the closing was announced.

That's all.

Cover and in-line images: Colette, The New York Times, WWD, Hypebeast.