Parallel universe

Inspired by Mars and beyond, experimental and experiential department store SKP-S explores new retail trajectories in Beijing

- NICK COMPTON

The ‘retail apocalypse’, a technology-driven blight, is leaving ailing high streets and zombie malls in its wake. Amazon, Alibaba and other e-commerce players, large and small, have transformed shopping into a sofa-based scroll and shoot. Well that’s what the headlines say. But this trail of disruption is not indiscriminate. You can outsmart it and outmaneuver it, even if that sometimes requires a speculative trip to Mars.

Late last year, SKP, China’s leading luxury department store operator, opened SKP-S, a smaller though still sizeable satellite to its brand-rich Beijing mothership. The new store’s ground-floor window display features a wide-screen tableau, not of designer desirables, but of nodding electric sheep and comic book heroic space farmers, buffeted by solar winds. The ‘future farm’ installation – the work of tyro South Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster – continues inside. Where you might expect the heady scent and bustling aisles of the beauty department, sheep are being cloned on clinically clean production lines.

By the time you get to the store’s third floor, heading skywards on infinity escalators, you are through the airlock of an apparently long-established Martian outpost where veteran terraformers pass on advice to their identical clones; landing modules and Martian buggies are parked up in red dirt; and a dome, apparently 3D-printed in the same Martian dust (actually painstakingly formed in gypsum concrete), offers views of our solar system and beyond (rendered by Australian studio Artists in Motion). There are also Nike trainers, Champion sweatshirts and Swatch watches, but they are housed in alcoves offa 2001: A Space Odyssey-style dichroic glass tunnel.