Multiplex at Selfridges, London

Tom Dixon’s latest project is a department store within a department store – but it takes everything you might expect from big retail and turns it on its head.

A collaboration with Wallpaper Magazine, MULTIPLEX is a rambling, immersive pop-up in the Old Selfridges Hotel; 20,000 square feet of disused space attached to Selfridge’s Oxford Street store.

Dark, industrial, creative and cool, MULTIPLEX is Dixon’s vision of what the department store of the future might look like – while drawing on London’s eclectic boutique past.

MULTIPLEX is almost an intellectual exercise, which aims to answer the question of how to turn shoppers from their computers and into the physical space: experiences, serendipitous discovery, surprising juxtapositions, and effortlessly cool and hard-to-find brands.

A Warholian aesthetic and reimagining of what it means to shop, forms the backbone of Tom Dixon and Wallpaper Magazine’s latest pop-up design project.

Clothing, fragrances, technology, food and furniture products from a hand-picked array of up and coming designers are grouped within the stripped-back, concrete space, which has been smothered in NASA-esque silver fabric and outfitted with stark chrome displays.

There’s even an in-store photographic studio and a co-working space studded with Macs, along with a rotating series of events to showcase the space and its vendors.

The aesthetic pays lip-service to Andy Warhol’s famed factory, and readily blurs the lines between department store and art installation.

The layout is deliberately unexpected – traditional department store categories blur into each other seamlessly.

The lines between brands and product types are also blurred, chipping away at the idea of brands as “islands”.

Given today’s multichannel buzz, there are playful concessions for online brands; such as the Moo.com paint party, where you can spray and white room with coloured paint from a water pistol.

Opening to coincide with London’s four key creative events – including Fashion Week and the Design Festival – it’s an event of its own.

Multiplex is open between 18th September to 15th October 2015.