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ALPHABET

Edited by SULEMAN ANAYA and JOERG KOCH 32c Magazine

BERLIN “Joffe and I spent a day in Berlin at a Comme des Garçons “guerrilla store,” which then occupied the former bookshop of the Brecht Museum, on a seedy block in the eastern sector of the city. It is part of an experiment in alternative retailing (inconspicuous consumption) which the company launched in 2004.There are now seven such outposts, most in Northern Europe, in cities like Helsinki and Ljubljana. Each of the stores is an ephemeral installation that opens without fanfare and closes after a year. Their decorating budgets are less than the price of some handbags at Gucci and Prada, and original fixtures, including raw cinder block and peeling wallpaper, are left as they are found. Brecht might have approved the poetic clothes and the proletarian mise en scène, if not the insurrectionary conceit. “But the word ‘guerrilla’ as Rei understands it isn’t political,” Joffe says. “It refers to a small group of like-minded spirits at odds with the majority. She’s fascinated by the Amish, for example, and the Orthodox Jews.”

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