Five weeks to rebuild a Berlin loft inside a store
The challenge Plajer & Franz Studio faced wasn’t just conceptual: Levi’s Iconstore had to be designed and built in just five weeks, racing against the clock to be ready in time for Berlin Fashion Week. The studio solved that urgency with a very concrete idea: make the store feel like an old Berlin industrial loft, with historic windows repurposed into shelving structures and window bars reused as garment rails.
Some of that glass is original to the period; other panes were replaced with acrylic panels silkscreened with the word «placestobe», a direct nod to the city itself. Old cast-iron radiators, rescued from demolition, became the base of the central presentation table, the piece that connects the store’s two rooms, separated by a change in floor level. The fitting rooms and the checkout counter were built by reusing historic doors found in the same building.
The result isn’t a stage set with catalog-style industrial aesthetics: it’s real Berlin architecture turned into a store, a store-design exercise that fuses the product (the jean, the craft) with the very urban fabric of the city where it’s sold.
Levi’s Iconstore in Berlin, designed by Plajer & Franz Studio, applies the same industrial, handcrafted language that dominated much of German retail in those years: reclaimed wood, raw metal, warm lighting and display cases that recall a tailor’s workshop more than a jeans store. The goal isn’t to sell more square meters of product, but to tell the craft behind every garment: antique sewing machines, fabric hung as if it were archival pieces, workbenches turned into counters.
It’s a clear example of how store design can become a brand argument: in an industry dominated by fast fashion, showing the process (the needle, the thread, the workshop) reinforces the value of a jean made to last.
Photos: news.diephotodesigner.de
