Shopping...in an alleyway!

Sunday, Nick and I had an interesting shopping experience at Commes Des Garcon's Guerilla Store in downtown LA.  Commes Des Garcon is actually a Japanese fashion house, and has numerous stores in Japan and Paris.  In fact, the reason we even visited the LA store was because we liked some of the clothes that we saw at the Paris store, and were hoping that there were some clothes that would interest us here.  

When we returned home, I started researching the label to see if they had stores in Los Angeles.  It turns out that they don't have a permanent store here, but they did have a Guerilla store.  What is a 'guerilla' store?  It's a concept store where Commes Des Garcon rents out a space for one year (and one year only), and places them in the less fashionable areas of certain cities, which is why the LA one is in downtown and not in Beverly Hills.  They spend very little money on decorating the stores, since they're planning on closing them down after one year.  

So back to the experience of finding the store and shopping there.  We find a parking space on the same street as the store, however, Nick needed to parallel park on the left side of the street, which was a new experience for him.  We get out, and see this:

Yes, the entrance to the store is a metal door that leads to an alleyway.  We go through and see this:

If it weren't for the traffic cone and the door which are both covered in the Commes Des Garcon Guerilla Store posters, we probably would have missed it.  The dumptser at the end gives it a certain...charm...  

The inside of the store is very small.  In fact, it was, and still is, a small artist's studio.  There were some interesting art installations, which we think were there before Commes Des Garcon rented it out.  Here's a tower of shopping carts, which has some items for sale hanging off of it:

Here's another photo of the inside, showing more garments hanging on the racks, as well as a drum set, which had some wallets on them.    

And another photo:

The clothes weren't too similar to what we saw in Paris.  After reading up about it when I got home, I found out that the Guerilla stores carry clothes that are exclusive to those stores.  What was also interesting was that it was difficult to determine which clothes were for men and which ones were for women.  The clothes were mixed in with each other on the shelves, and this label tends to be non-traditional with their fashion.  For example, there were numerous skirts for men...skirts that would have also looked fine if a woman wore them, but they had the label "Commes Des Garcon Homme Plus" on them.  Nick and I had to constantly read the label to make sure that we were finding the men's clothes and not the women's, although, I think the point of this organization was that if you liked it, you should get it, no matter who it was intended for.

The only problem with this store was that because of it's small size, they didn't have many items in our sizes, so we were limited on what we could buy.  However, we were still able to find a few shirts that we liked.  

The store opened up in February of this year, so we have until February of 2009 to go back again.  We might do so to see what their Spring/Summer selection is.  But after taking a look at Commes Des Garcon's Spring/Summer 2009 line, I'm not sure that there'll be anything tame enough for me to wear...and no, I'm not buying one of those skirts :)