PARIS — The Plaza Athénée Spa has some competition this Paris Fashion Week, at least for the attention of Oscar nominees, Chloe models and first-tier influencers with second-day blowouts who desperately need a facial. They’re headed to the third arrondissement courtesy of an emerging skincare brand, Monastery Beauty, in partnership with an unexpected retail contender for skincare: Dover Street Perfume Market, known to frequent shoppers and hawkish beauty analysts as DSPM.
On Wednesday, the US skincare label created by esthetician Athena Hewett, whose clients include Sofia Coppola, Kirsten Dunst, the entire Khaite runway cast, opens The Skin Sanctuary, a weeklong pop-up at the Paris gallery Vie Projects. The residency is sponsored by the new media company Semaine, and offers cult products like the brand’s Rose Cleansing Oil and Botanical Repairing Concentrate alongside one-on-one signature facials from Hewett and her team.
It’s a big step for Monastery, the indie California-based brand that makes its signature face oils on-site in its Bay Area headquarters.
“This is the biggest thing we’ve ever done,” said Hewett from San Francisco International Airport just before she boarded her flight to Paris. Hewett estimates she’s spent $50,000 on the pop-up, including development, retail product and labor. “My husband this morning was like, ‘Go get ‘em, Athena, because this is insane.’”
It’s also a flare from Dover Street Market, the ever-evolving conceptual space from Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe that signals the company’s greater global ambitions in the beauty space. The die-hard cool retailer has taken its own, distinctly Doverish approach to building out the category, helping some of its fashion clients like Vaquera and Setchu to launch fragrance and opening DSPM, its multicategory beauty store, in 2019.
According to buying and development director Mateusz Kalinowski, that expansion puts Dover Street Perfume Market’s beauty growth “in the solid double digits” year over year. Kalinowski didn’t elaborate on what’s driving that growth, while Joffe, Dover Street Market’s chief executive and the man behind all of its decisions, wasn’t available to comment.
Like all things connected to the Kawakubo universe, Dover Street Perfume Market is notoriously hushed in its press dealings… which makes their willingness to put their name on a skincare pop-up even more intriguing.
The Dover Street Difference
Dover Street Market’s store layout abides by a “beautiful chaos”, in Joffe’s words, which guides shoppers through bare-wood labyrinths that sometimes, if you’re lucky, lead you straight to a Rick Owens gown.
Since its founding in 2004, the store’s beauty section has mostly been constrained to CDG Scent, Comme des Garçons’ fragrance line. Now its seven worldwide stores have each built out multicategory assortments, and served as the launchpad for scents from nascent brands like Chopova Loewa and Setchu.
Of all DSPM’s locations, Paris has the most complete beauty offerings, including fragrances by DS & Durga, skincare by Pharrell’s brand Humanrace and runway-caliber makeup by Isamaya Ffrench. Every buying decision passes through Adrian Joffe himself — a fact that shocked Hewett when she was first approached by DSPM last spring.
“I didn’t actually know Dover Street’s beauty arm was operating in such a small, curated way,” she says. “It feels bigger, but they’re a family business, like us.”
In October, Monastery loaded its signature botanical oil serums onto DSPM’s shelves for the first time, joining a small but growing skincare section including brands like Dulcie (formerly Haeckels) and Isla. The sell-through rate was over 70 percent in under a week. “That type of retail activity just doesn’t happen unless you’re a movie star selling product in person at a special event,” Hewett says. “Mateusz was like, ‘Yes, we know, this is crazy.’ The shoppers at DSPM are there to discover, but they’re also really ready to buy.” (Kalinowsky confirmed it was the on-the-ground reaction from the Dover Street Parfums Market customers in Paris that made Joffe and his team press the “go” button for its first-ever beauty offsite space.)
Sources attributed part of the retailer’s point-of-difference is an obsessive insistence on hiring true beauty junkies and encouraging — even mandating — that sales staff interrogate product founders before selling their products.
“The sales staff, they make you prove why they should sell your product, not the other way around,” said a beauty executive who wasn’t authorised to speak on the record but went through three rounds of vetting before launching into the store. “I respect it, honestly. They want their customers to trust them more than they want their cash. That just doesn’t happen at Sephora right now.”
Hewett confirms the staff obsession. “I’ve never heard so many people ask about, like, terpenes,” she recalled with a laugh. “They were really grilling me. I actually thought it was great.”
Stay Small to Scale Big
Curation to the point of gatekeeping is essentially the point, admitted Kalinowski, citing “a market oversaturated with beauty brands that follow aggressive product releases.” Brands like Monastery, he explained, “stand out for their honest approach” to solving problems instead of making franchises.
According to DSPM, other best-sellers at the space currently include 39BC’s Fig Milk Oil Body Cleanser, the Korean Kiln Sauna Candle from Jjimjil and Abel’s Laundry Day Eau de Parfum, indicating a customer preference on bathing culture and wellness over straight-up mascara and lipstick.
The small-is-big strategy mirrors Dover Street Market’s overall philosophy, which centres tightly edited collections by indie designers over heaving racks of easy-to-wear favourites. Its beauty assortment has to be just as tightly edited, with brands rarified enough to make the shopper feel “chosen” for discovering them, but accessible enough to be purchased on a whim. (Not too accessible, though: Right now, you can’t even buy Dover Street Parfums Market offerings on their website.)
“Isn’t it amazing?” says Hewett with sincerity. “You have to discover what they think is special, but unless you show up there, that discovery has to be fulfilled somewhere else. It’s like they create a mission for beauty fans to have to fulfil. And the brand visibility. The aesthetic alignment. It’s everything.”
Sofia Coppola is confirmed for a Monastery facial in Paris; other names in the mix include Diane Kruger, Alexa Chung, and Gaia Repossi. (Hewett is also negotiating a deal with a celebrity luxury brand that shows in Paris; she may do the skin prep backstage, despite the fact that this celebrity has her own branded skincare line.)
As DSPM bets on Monastery, the brand is also betting that its pop-up will shore up its fashion associations and be discovered by an if-you-know-you-know clientele. Monastery is technically profitable, but like Dover Street Market itself, pours an astronomical amount of fiscal and artistic capital straight back into the business. They estimate that their revenue will grow from $8 million in 2025 to $15 million in 2026.
“And we will still be broke,” Hewett says. “But you know, that’s better than being really boring.”
Sign up to The Business of Beauty newsletter, your complimentary, must-read source for the day’s most important beauty and wellness news and analysis.
