Extreme Cashmere reimagines retail with its new Amsterdam store: ‘You want to take your shoes off and stay’

Extreme Cashmere is known for its hospitality: each lunchtime, the team sits down in its Amsterdam head office and dines together, along with any of the day’s guests (Wallpaper* joined for the ritual in 2022). The scene has since been replicated in Paris, where the knitwear brand holds its showroom each season – guests are invited to stay for food and drink served on crockery shipped from Amsterdam – as well as at its various pop-ups in St Moritz, Los Angeles, London and New York.

So, when the brand set about planning its first permanent address in Amsterdam’s Utrechtsestraat district, founder Saskia Dijkstra sought to capture a similar sense of home and comfort. ‘We always make every[where] home wherever we go,’ she tells Wallpaper*, noting that the shop’s location is more of a ‘lifestyle area’ than a typical shopping street. ‘There's a butcher, a record store, a pharmacy, coffee stores... [I] live around the corner, and our head office is a short canal-side walk away.’ (Most importantly, her favourite restaurant, Zoldering, is right next door.)

Inside Extreme Cashmere’s new Amsterdam store

The decision to open a store in Amsterdam was not always on the cards, says Dijkstra, having focused more on international expansion in recent years. ‘But then the opportunity came to us to do something closer to home,’ she explains. ‘A lot of the decisions we make come from instinct combined with planning – we saw the space, and we decided to go for it. It was quite spontaneous.’ That said, it was partly about demand, having found the casual, by-appointment-only store in the Amsterdam head office increasingly busy. ‘We wanted to open up a little.’

As for the store’s design, Dijkstra was determined to do things differently – a reflection of Extreme Cashmere’s renegade approach. Having worked in manufacturing production for major fashion brands including Joseph and Jil Sander, it was founded from a desire to create the perfect sweater, though has since expanded into a colourful, irreverent all-cashmere wardrobe, from classic jumpers to ball gowns, tube tops and muscle tees (‘no limits, no concessions’, runs its tagline). Everything is one size (the brand encourages you to shop instead by shape) and, befitting the ‘Extreme’ name, encourages a new generation to wear the typically bourgeois fabric through fluorescent hues and unexpected campaigns.

‘To persuade women in their sixties to wear cashmere is easy, but to make young people feel cool is not,’ Dijkstra previously told Wallpaper*. ‘To have just one brand, and to dress everybody, it’s good.

‘We wanted to make the most beautiful store in Amsterdam – it had to be luxury,’ she says of the space, which was a collaboration between the Extreme Cashmere team and architect Hidde Dijkstra. ‘But we also wanted to do things differently, so from the beginning we knew there would be no rails – we want to present our products to customers ourselves. That way you get drawn in by the world of Extreme Cashmere; the garments are so precious to us that we want to give the experience more time, personal attention, and weight.’

Many of the store’s design elements had come from observing shoppers at Extreme Cashmere’s pop-ups, particularly a recent New York opening. ‘We picked up on how well the market stall-style way of working with products worked,’ she says. ‘We had a large block in the middle of the pop-up with the products displayed flat, [so we could] connect directly while the customer touched the product; we pulled out styles that we thought would fit, something that catches their eye, almost like how you'd shop for fresh produce at a market. We’re sizeless and genderless, so we feel taking the time to find your style and fit is really important.’

Lushly carpeted, the store centres around a stainless steel kitchen block – the first element to be decided, and a reference to the label’s love of food – while a Miele washing machine nods to Dijkstra’s evangelical approach to garment care (a ‘cashmere spa’, in collaboration with Miele, opened during Paris Fashion Week earlier this year). ‘The space is about contrast, that's very extreme – really leaning towards the idea of soft against hard, and embracing lifestyle as a full expression of our brand,’ she says.

Elsewhere, numerous design objects populate the space, including a Fantana ‘Uovo’ lamp, lamps from Studio Alex de Witte (found during Paris Fashion Week at a flea market), Eames chairs, curtains from Kvadrat/Raf Simons, and a modular sofa by COR. Champagne coupes were Dijkstra’s parents when they lived in Paris for a time in the 1970s, while hand-painted ceramics came from a recent trip the team took to Seoul. The space is completed by a ‘library’, comprising a selection of books curated by the Extreme Cashmere team (Dijkstra says it's her favourite part of the store).

‘We’re so happy to be here – it’s very satisfying,’ she says. ‘It makes sense. It’s surprising. There's no direct retail references – it almost feels like a cool jazz bar, an intimate library. It feels like a place you want to be, you want to take your shoes off and stay there, to try on everything.’

Extreme Cashmere, Utrechtsestraat 143, 1017 VM Amsterdam, Netherlands

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