Billionaires Boys Club (BBC), the premium fashion brand founded by Pharrell Williams and Nigo, recently launched a pop-up shop in the newly opened Galeries Lafayette in Paris, utilising USM structures and furniture to display their designs.
The application of USM demonstrates its suitability for pop-up retail environments, thanks in particular to its modularity and quality, as well as its ability to be easily reconfigured once the pop-up has reached the end of its life cycle.
Located on the famous Parisian shopping street Champs-Élysées, the Art Deco building of Galeries Lafayette has been transformed by Danish architecture practice Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Considered to be a ‘laboratoire de commerce’ (commercial laboratory) by Galeries Lafayette’s CEO Nicolas Houze, it is claimed to be ‘changing the relationship between the label and its clients, partners and collaborators by creating an intuitive and reactive shopping experience’.
The modular nature of USM Haller enabled flexibility, allowing the furniture to be adapted easily, while its chrome perfectly reflects the light inside the space and complements the metal-clad walls inside the space. Where possible, the structure is free of shelving, allowing light to pass through and maximising the photographic moon-tiled floor, which matches wireframe- and vector-based graphics that the BBC brand has become renowned for.
Together BBC and Galeries Lafayette wanted to create a space that reflected the feeling of a Billionaire Boys Club European flagship space but also represented the brand’s forward-thinking in an architecturally led department.
