Further along Via Condotti in Rome I happened to come across these stores - Stuart Weitzman (above) and Vicmatie (below). The Stuart Weitzman store reminds me a little of Frank Gehry's Issey Miyake store on Hudson in New York. Of course the Miyake store is rather more sophisticated than this one although while teaching my students about fashion trends recently, I thought that this was such a great example of how Commercial spaces as in Fashion are possibly translated from the designer stores (albeit on the high street) to the more commercial ventures? What I cant say of course is that there is a direct link between the two stores in relation to their design and that one was in fact influenced by the other, however it is interesting how closely the designs are linked. The Vicmatie store had an interesting concept based on the repetition of a photographic image. I thought that this concept needs to be a much bigger statement. Perhaps the use of a backdrop of some kind would have created a much stronger context and varying the size of the repeated photographs beyond those in vinyl on the glass - which incidentally I think works very well.
