1 Orchard Street, London, W1H 6JS

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Open-plan and eclectic, MULTIPLEX is a futuristic reimagining of what a department store should be.

Open-plan and eclectic, MULTIPLEX is a futuristic reimagining of what a department store should be.

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Designed to be experienced as well as consumed, products are displayed as though in an art gallery or museum

Designed to be experienced as well as consumed, products are displayed as though in an art gallery or museum

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All of the familiar department store elements are on display – but never in the way you expect.

All of the familiar department store elements are on display – but never in the way you expect.

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In keeping with the experiential mandate, brands have been encouraged to bring their own creative ideas to their displays.

In keeping with the experiential mandate, brands have been encouraged to bring their own creative ideas to their displays.

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Fit your own specs tech display from Cubitts

Fit your own specs tech display from Cubitts

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Designed to coincide with London’s Fashion Week and Design Week, MULTIPLEX is positioned as a design event in its own right.

Designed to coincide with London’s Fashion Week and Design Week, MULTIPLEX is positioned as a design event in its own right.

Photography courtesy of Echochamber's intrepid photographer Zoe Savitz

Multiplex at Selfridges, London


Location:

1 Orchard Street, London, W1H 6JS

selfridges.com

Design Credit:

Tom Dixon, London
tomdixon.net

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.

 


Words by Matthew Brown


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