Isabel Marant Stores Paris & Seoul

Fashion label Isabel Marant's Tokyo boutique, designed by Paris-based studio Ciguë and featured in Frame #90, has been turning heads with it's under-construction wooden beams and concrete floors - a blend of high fashion and stripped-down style. But Tokyo is just one of the stores designed for Marant by Ciguë - she also commissioned the team to design stores in Seoul and Paris.

The design studio got their start in 2011, designing shops for cosmetics brand Aesop before catching the eye of Marant. She hired the studio, a group of six designers who met while studying architecture in Paris, to design the shops simultaneously (along with a fourth in Hong Kong.)

In Seoul, the store is enclosed in a grey concrete façade with a cut out window and overlapping window displays made from aluminium plates by French artist Arnold Goron, with a textured wood ceiling and the polished concrete floors also found in Paris and Tokyo.

The Paris store, on avenue Victor Hugo, features glass partitions and leafy vegetation amongst wooden shelving blocks and papery back-lit ‘houses’.

Ciguë explained Marant’s guidelines for the shop design in an interview with writer Billy Nolan in Frame. ‘For all her innovation, there’s a conventional side to her,’ explained Hugo Haas, one of the studio’s six founders. ‘She told us she liked oak, grey concrete and black steel. And Charlotte Perriand, Jean Prouvé and Le Corbusier. That was more or less it.’