NOTED 02: FamilyMart, Tokyo
FamilyMart, Japan's second-biggest convenience chain, has opened a konbini in Tokyo's Azabudai district with better architecture than most Bond Street flagships, a grey pavilion with rounded corners, glass on all sides and a garden on the roof. Open 24 hours. Sells onigiri, batteries and clothes.
Look at who built it. NIGO and Wonderwall's Masamichi Katayama have been a pair since the late nineties, when Katayama's interiors turned A Bathing Ape from a t-shirt label into a retail religion. Between them they've since produced STORE by NIGO, the Human Made flagships, NIGO's Design Museum retrospective and the staging for Louis Vuitton's Paris menswear shows. The architects of streetwear's entire retail language, hired by a corner shop. Correctly.
The clothes deserve the upgrade. Convenience Wear, FamilyMart's own line, has been designed by Hiromichi Ochiai of FACETASM since 2021, and its striped socks in the chain's blue and green became a proper cult object, a few hundred yen at the till, with more brand discipline than most luxury capsule collections manage at fifty times the price. At Azabudai the line finally gets touchscreens, fitting rooms and staff uniforms art-directed as hard as the building.
Fashion has spent a decade cosplaying the corner shop, strip lighting, crate shelving, ironic carrier bags. The corner shop noticed, hired fashion's favourite architects and did the whole thing properly. If your brand is paying someone to make its store feel like the local Spar, the local Spar just out-crafted you.
