The Dazed Club Dover Street Market event in New York was, in one sense, a shopping afternoon: members picked complimentary pieces from a new Comme des Garçons Play drop, posed for a photographer, and chatted over shared enthusiasms in a space many of them already treated as a pilgrimage site. In another sense, it was a small rite inside a much larger ritual, and that larger ritual is worth understanding before the afternoon’s details come into focus.
The meaning of Tachiagari
Tachiagari is the Japanese term (translating, roughly, as ‘beginning’ or ‘start’) that Dazed and Dover Street Market use to describe the store’s biannual pause: a closure to redesign the space, reset its installations, and usher in fresh collections. It is a gesture that takes retail theatre seriously, insisting that a shop is not merely a backdrop to commerce but an environment with its own seasonal logic, its own capacity to surprise. The Tachiagari ritual belongs to a founding philosophy that has never quite relaxed into the ordinary. Dover Street Market opened in London’s Mayfair in 2004, founded by Wallpaper* notes, by Rei Kawakubo and her husband Adrian Joffe. In 2016 it relocated to a cavernous site in Haymarket, below Piccadilly, and has since expanded to outposts in Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles and Paris. The New York store, then, is one node in a network that was conceived from the beginning as something other than a conventional luxury retailer.
The Dazed Club takeover in New York followed a previous one at DSM London. Both events are, in miniature, the same kind of proposition that Tachiagari itself makes: that a community gathered around culture and clothes can briefly transform a commercial space into something more like a salon.
What the Dazed Club Dover Street Market afternoon actually looked like
The event was exclusive, organised through the Comme des Garçons Play drop and accessible via the Dazed Club app. Members who had signed up were invited to select a complimentary Comme des Garçons Play item from a range of t-shirts and sweatshirts, which is the kind of detail that tends to concentrate the mind: a free piece from a label with the cultural weight of CdG Play is not nothing, and the choice itself became part of the afternoon’s texture.
New York was under a raincloud on the day, which the gathering declined to treat as a reason for brevity. With their chosen pieces in hand, Dazed Clubbers moved through the store’s layered spaces, talking with one another and with teams from both Dover Street Market and Comme des Garçons about designers and collections. Han Alexander, a photographer and Dazed Clubber, was on hand throughout, capturing outfits against the store’s recognisable interior backdrops. Self-styling and community were, in this setting, the same activity.
After the shoot wrapped, a number of Clubbers stayed on, turning what had been a scheduled afternoon into something more impromptu. That extension is its own kind of signal: an event that people want to continue after its formal reason for existing has concluded has, by most measures, worked.
Tachiagari, in the DSM calendar, marks both an ending and a beginning. The Dazed Club takeover landed at precisely that threshold, which is, if nothing else, good timing. The Dazed Club app, available free on iOS and Android, carries details of forthcoming events in the programme.
