Remember Shopping…In Stores? Colette Mon Amour Will Make You Nostalgic

Style Points is a weekly column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.To watch Colette, Mon Amour, the new documentary about the beloved Paris boutique, at a time when “going inside a store” and “mingling with other people” both feel like alien activities hits, as they say, different. Watching, I was immediately transported to the last time I walked through the doors of the store on the Rue Saint-Honoré. It was during Paris Fashion Week, and I was there to see a fashion show being held upstairs, but first I had to ford my way through a first floor full of excited elbow-to-elbow shoppers excitedly brandishing their finds.

Andelman, Rousseaux, and the Colette crew at the store’s closing in 2017.
Karl Hab

A few months after I made that visit, in December 2017, Colette closed its doors after 20 years, and in the film celebrities and designers mourn its passing, their distress shown via cutesy animated tear emojis. Virgil Abloh, Kanye West, Sacai’s Chitose Abe, and Kith’s Ronnie Fieg are among those giving their eulogies. “When I heard about the closing, I was in disbelief,” says Pharrell Williams. “I’m still in disbelief.” West sums it up: “Colette was the internet before the internet.”

Kim Kardashian browses the store in 2015.
Marc PiaseckiGetty Images

Directed by Hugues Lawson-Body, Colette, Mon Amour has enough talking heads to fill a CNN one-hour block, but it doesn’t stint on showing the parts of the store that were more removed from the celebrity buzz cycle: the kids and tourists lined up around the block, streaming in every day at 11am as if into a theme park, a brace-faced kid whose parents named her after the store, and the diverse cast of cool kids working there, tenders of the Colette temple who helped make the store what it was.

Colette regular Karl Lagerfeld at the store in 2009.
Foc KanGetty Images

Of course, at the heart of the Colette magic are Colette Rousseaux, the store’s namesake, and her daughter Sarah Andelman. “We never tried to create this cult,” Andelman swears when I reach her on the phone. The two convinced brands to do collaborations back when those were a novelty, working with everyone from huge fashion houses like Hermès and Chanel, to street…

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Source: elle.com