Photos from the feral frontlines of the Dover Street Market archive sale

Dover Street Market Market, the concept store’s legendary archive sale, is the stuff of fashion folklore. A bargain basement where Comme des Garçons is hawked at 70 per cent discounts. A pig pen where fashion’s most esteemed editors strip down to their underwear at the prospect of landing cheap Junya Watanabe. A cockpit where anyone with even a vague interest in clothes will fill behemoth laundry bags with Simone Rocha frocks and laser-cut Noir Kei Ninomiya gowns and old bits of Raf Simon’s tenure at Calvin Klein. Held this week at the gargantuan Printworks nightclub, it was the first time in six years that DSM had unlocked its vaults, with queues coiling around the venue for hours and hours and hours. 

Unlike other fashion events, Market Market is not so much a place to be seen as it is a place to go undetected. There’s something quite exposing about feeling hundreds of eyeballs on you as you do the mental acrobatics to establish whether some bustled sweater would make you look like an anaemic boy prince or not. (It does and I still bought it). And as much as these one-off sample sales are a fight to the death – see also: Chlöe Sevigny’s wardrobe clear-out that took place in New York last weekend – the smug feeling of leaving the sale with a pendulous brown bag of archive Comme is a rare kind of pleasure. So too is the feeling of passing a charitable “good luck!” to the people still withering in the queue. 

Click through the galleries above (taken by Morgane Maurice) and below (taken by Dazed Clubbers) to see some of the best street-style looks at the opening day of Dover Street Market Market.