Mandarina Duck Flagship Store, Paris
date: 2000
Mandarina Duck is an Italian manufacturer and sales company for luggage, clothing and accessories. Droog was commissioned to design their flagship store in Paris and selected NL Architects for the job.
Anyone entering the shop will be surprised by the fact that there is no classic visual uniformity. The unity lies in the ways in which products are displayed and surprising facilities that visitors meet when they are shopping. NL Architects came up with colourful and playful ‘cocoons’.
On the ground floor there's a tunnel for accessories, a 3,60 diameter floating cloche with a rail inside for clothing and a wall made out of a coloured rubber bands, to put objects behind.
The second floor features, among other things, 'blister displays' for ensembles, large fitting rooms behind a forest of glass fibres and a pin-wall with metal pins that can be moved back and forth, to enclose objects on display according to their shape. Between the floors is a motorized spiral staircase.
Pallet Tunnel: It's an object made out of sculputural elements that are normally used for transportation of goods in a compact way: pallets. We made them out of a transluscent plastic in order to illuminate the object as a whole and let the items that are on display hint at their presence. The objective is to enhance a state of desire. The pallets wrap around creating a slightly higher floor in the object thus allowing a slightly different perpective through the shop. Once you're in the tunnel a more intimate relation with the products is established.
Incubator: The small items display. Normally these objects are behind glass and affection is only established visually. The incubator allows a more sensory experience; you can touch the items, hold them, feel them.
Inverse clothes rack: The sybol for the shop concept as a whole. Normally clothes racks expose their content explicitly; in the face. The shape of the inversed clothes rack is derived from it's content (clothes on hangers) thus indicating in a more indirect but hopefully more attractive way what it is about. Evoking a kind of curiousity, a longing for the products. The cocoon creates an identifyable ('countable') but strange object in the room in order to resolve the paradox to be exclusive and to have many products on display at the same time.
Counter: long in order to serve many customers and to put variable products or information on display. Color: Mandarina Duck Yellow
Vacuumwall: Easy-to-change display for clothes. Two sheets of tranparant plastic hold the fashion item; they seem to be suspended in the air.
Curtain room: 3 Circular multi-platvorm displays for bags. 10 Kilometers of a small steel-beats-chain-curtain create a 'permeable wall', a 'room' that can be accessed or left at any point. The elegant curves appear as a result of the offset of the display dishes, such that you can freely browse around them.
Socle: mini version of pallet tunnel for display of bags
Fluo-cupboards: shelfs made out of fluorescent light fixtures; products 'supported' by light only. No distinction between shelf and fixture.
Mirror boxes: a version of small items display.
Pinwall: aluminum steel pipes can be pushed in or out the surface such that products (mainly bags) can be displayed. On the shopwindow side of the pinwall the impression will be visible; the mergandize is shown in an indirect way: a 3D xray.
