The days of walking round shops full of items you can’t afford in environments that make you feel out of touch may be numbered.

Picture this – you arrive at a store in need of a drink. A beer might be nice, possibly a glass of white or may be just a bottle of mineral water.

For the latter, look no further than the Water Bar, an eatery in the Paris concept store Colette.

Recommendations from your water sommelier

Here you can eat many of the things you would associate with a brasserie and wash it all down with a glass of sparkling or still water selected for you by a ‘water sommelier’.

The average price for a bottle of the stuff is €6, but you can pay up to €10 for Sembrancher, which comes from the Swiss Alps.

Just want a glass of eau de tap? Noses may be turned up at your choice.

The point is, Colette closes in December. It has been around since 1997 and is, in many ways, emblematic of what the concept store stands for.

This is a place with mostly only semi-wearable, very expensive clothes, some minor artworks by people you won’t have heard of and then the ‘entry price’ items on the ground floor there just so you can walk away with a bag bearing the store’s name.

The surprise perhaps is that it has stayed the course for so long. The unsurprising part is that there is only one branch of Colette; it has never spread its wings to become a trendy force elsewhere.

This is not the case with other fashionable concept stores. Milan’s 10 Corso Como has outposts in Shanghai, New York, Beijing and Seoul, while Dover Street Market – the original store of which was in launched in the London street of the same name – has five emporia, the latest having opened in Singapore.

“Yes, they are quite fun to wander round from time to time, but the sight of a purchase being made is relatively unusual”

Broadly the same rules apply to these two as to Colette. Visit in order to feel the zeitgeist and also to have the sense that you are not a la mode.

The wonder in all of this is that these stores make money. Yes, they are quite fun to wander round from time to time, but the sight of a purchase being made is relatively unusual.

Sign of the times

But Colette is closing and perhaps this is a sign of the times.

Do we really need concept stores of this kind and should other, more mainstream operators, be seeking to imitate what is done in these pleasure palaces?

Probably not and it’s hard not to wonder why we have been thrall to them for so long.