On Sunday night in Paris, local creative fixture Ramdane Touhami was admiring the new Bode store that had just opened on a quiet street in the 1st arrondissement. It was late, but the shop was bustling with fashion editors and other front-row types who had come straight from the Balenciaga show to pick up new pairs of Bode Rec. x Nike Astrograbber sneakers a week before the official release. A couple of employees relaxed on the opulent antique furniture that filled the space, which felt a bit like a family-owned New England tackle store had popped up inside a salon at the Ritz, with fly fishing ephemera mixing with objets-d’art sourced from a Paris flea.
“It’s a place you want to spend time. You don’t want to leave, it’s kind of like you feel at home or at a friend’s house,” said Touhami. The French-Moroccoan polymath knows a thing or two about how to hack the competitive retail system—Touhami and his wife, Victoire de Taillac-Touhami, successfully revived the historic Parisian apothecary Buly 1803, which made the candles that flickered around the room. Touhami nodded approvingly as a handful of editors grabbed their shoeboxes and reluctantly raced out the door to the next show. “Everyone comes to say Paris is a new shopping destination,” he said. “I think it’s true, but Parisians, we are not curious about that. Every generation has its addresses, and you don’t go to new addresses. But this one is going to be an address.”
TOM SCANLAN
The opening weekend at 6 Rue de Valois, located in an auspicious real estate sandwich between the Palais-Royal and Emily In Paris’s fictional PR agency office, seemed to confirm that hunch. In terms of pure street-level buzz, Bode might have been the splashiest debut in a Paris Fashion Week that saw the launch of Haider Ackermann at Tom Ford and Sarah Burton at Givenchy. In the first hours of business, over 200 people walked through the doors. Hundreds more streamed in throughout the rest of the day.
“It was actually crazy how many of them were wearing Bode,” noted Aaron Aujla, who designed the store alongside his wife, Emily Adams Bode Aujla. Aujla was surprised because though Bode had a spot on the official Paris Fashion Week calendar as recently as January 2023, the flagship is the brand’s first serious retail presence in the city. The pent-up enthusiasm was obvious at the opening party on Friday night, where a who’s-who of Paris Fashion Week drank champagne and admired the colorful fishing tie wallpaper lining the bathroom and the heavy wood display tables sourced from a Bank of France firesale. Colorful felt berets sat alongside cotton underwear embroidered with the Eiffel Tower; racks of knit polos and embroidered trousers ran along the walls. At one point, a wide-eyed French stylist summed up the general reception: “This store is insane!”
