By Samuel Hine

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After Colette closed in 2017, Sarah Andelman promised that she would never reopen the pioneering Parisian concept store that she and her mother, Colette Roussaux, ran for two decades. It wasn’t for a lack of offers or pleas from customers, whose obsession with the eclectic shop on Rue Saint-Honoré bordered on religion. (As captured in the postmortem documentary Colette, Mon Amour, at least one fan named his daughter after his favorite retail haunt.) But Andelman had moved on and her mother had retired. As Andelman recalled in a recent phone call, “We turned the page. I always say: no more.”
But now, a new—if brief—chapter of Colette is set to begin, thanks to Andelman’s history of collaboration with Virgil Abloh. On September 30, Virgil Abloh: The Codes is set to open at the Grand Palais in Paris. The exhibition, the first major European show of the late polymath’s work, will include a Colette installation that serves as both living artwork and, of course, gift shop.
The pop-up will look and feel similar to the original fashion hotspot’s famous ground-floor boutique, which Andelman always stocked with a dynamic assortment of emerging designer collections, graphic tees, sneakers, fragrances, limited-edition merch, and an extensive selection of art books and fashion magazines. It will even have the same scent: Andelman is bringing back the store’s iconic “L’Air De Colette” candle for the occasion. “I still receive messages from people asking for the candle,” she said, which will be sold alongside reissued products Abloh designed for the store during his career; Abloh-related books and zines; and new merch by collaborators and friends like Cactus Plant Flea Market, Travis Scott, and Sterling Ruby’s S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA.
In a press release, Shannon Abloh, CEO of Virgil Abloh Securities (VAS) and steward of her husband’s legacy, stated: “Virgil had a deep reverence for Colette and a belief in using retail spaces as platforms for cultural expression. I am truly moved to be able to honor Virgil’s legacy in this way and humbled by the passion these dear collaborators poured into this idea.”
Abloh and Andelman were close friends who shared a curiosity-driven creative sensibility. “There was such a sense of respect for each other because we share the same open mind,” Andelman said. “We were both open to the next encounters you didn’t expect.” She described the unlikely Colette revival for The Codes as a tribute to the designer, who had an unbridled “excitement to transmit his creativity to the new generation.” When the VAS team proposed the project, “Of course I accepted immediately.”
While her mother ran the store’s operations, Andelman was the buyer with a generous but decisive eye. At the heart of Colette’s singular mix was Andelman’s abiding belief that what was happening on the streets was as important as what was happening on the runway. Before fashion took sneakers and streetwear seriously, Colette stocked limited edition Nikes alongside Chanel.
Abloh credited her with giving him his big break in Paris. “My partnership with Colette defined my career,” Abloh said when the store closed. “Off-White couldn’t exist if Colette didn’t exist.” Indeed, Andelman embraced Abloh before the rest of Paris took the hip-hop consigliere from Chicago seriously, lowering a ladder as he tried to scale the walls of the Paris fashion establishment.
“I remember like yesterday the first time we met with Virgil,” Andelman said. Though her dates are fuzzy—understandable, considering Colette had different window installations and special projects just about every week for 20 years—it was likely during an early 2010s edition of Paris Fashion Week Men’s that Abloh was a fixture at the store. “During the shows, there was an explosion of cool people coming to Colette,” Andelman recalled. Abloh soaked up the energy of a space where art, design, and fashion collided in unexpected ways, where Karl Lagerfeld shopped by day and Travis Scott performed at night. He could often be found taking meetings at the Colette Water Bar, and shopping in between. “I was buying things from weirdo cool new guys, more classic and established people, and it was this balance of what we would offer that inspired him,” she said.
Andelman and Colette supported Abloh at critical junctures in his career. Colette was the first retailer to hold an event with Abloh, when he launched Pyrex Vision in 2013, and the first store to place an order when the designer launched Off-White a few years later. Andelman recalled a launch of a little-remembered Off-White x Golden Goose sneaker collab in 2016, where she second-guessed her decision to commit to 100 pairs. “They were quite expensive, and I was a little worried that we would not sell them. And of course they sold out in one evening, because that was Virgil.”
None of this might have transpired if not for a fortuitous moment in 2008, when Andelman happened to spot an email from a young guy named Virgil Abloh at the top of her inbox.
“I’m lucky that I saw the email, because I always had a hundred thousand unread emails,” Andelman says. Abloh had attached a mock-up of a graphic T-shirt where Colette was spelled out in a tangle of medallions. Andelman didn’t know much about him, and the pitch arrived out of the blue, but she quickly placed an order for a few dozen. It was only the third graphic tee Abloh had ever sold, a major point of validation for the burgeoning designer.
“I liked the sincerity of how he wrote, and most importantly, I liked the design,” Andelman said. “I thought it was cute and cool. And I suppose it was a sign of his genius to reach like this to propose the project.” The originals sold out in a flash, but on September 30, the T-shirts will be hanging on the racks of Colette one last time.