There are a lot of strange retail stores in Northern California, but by far the strangest we’ve ever visited is Gentle Monster, located in the Westfield Mall in San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley.
It greets visitors with a massive contemporary art installation, featuring two animatronic donkeys staring at each other as they emerge from a futuristic portal.
The donkeys are incredibly realistic; they blink, wave their tails, and gently sway their heads from side to side. Most visitors initially think they’re real, until they realize the donkeys move predictably, as if on a loop.
Behind them, a giant metal wall slowly expands and contracts. For reasons that were probably clear to the artist, but no one else, they’re standing on the broken remnants of a Roman ruin.
What this has to do with sunglasses, which is what Gentle Monster actually sells, isn’t entirely clear. The massive art installation takes up the entire front of the store, and you have to carefully walk around it in order to actually see the merchandise.
Especially in a region with some of the highest-priced retail space in the world, taking up half of your store with animatronic donkeys is the ultimate flex.
Gentle Monster just gets stranger from there. Inside the store, there’s another giant sculpture with a robot arm. It slowly lowers several fabric-like appendages towards a giant rock, never actually touching them.
Deeper in the store, there’s an incredibly realistic sculpture of an older woman, bent over as if asleep, or perhaps deep in thought. Except when you look at her midriff, it’s a jumble of wires and metal. She’s an android!
Despite all this strange contemporary art, Gentle Monster does indeed have sunglasses for sale. They’re pricey, with most pairs ranging from $150-$500. On our visit, people tried on some of the sunglasses, but primarily ogled the art and took photos of it for social media.
Ultimately, that’s probably the point. In an era where most people buy things online, retail spaces are less about shopping and more about experiences. Gentle Monster’s store is less a place to buy sunglasses, and more a performance that gets people excited about the brand.
No one ever posted a picture of the exterior of a Sunglasses Hut on social media. But if you walk into a store and are greeted by animatronic donkeys, it’s worth telling other people about.
We’ll probably see more of this retail space as a performance trend as e-commerce continues to swallow the world. Gentle Monster’s donkeys may be strange. But they’re also a harbinger of retail futures yet to come.
Read Next
