Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and Hermès have started a new trend in luxe retail -- The Pop-Up Shop. Once reserved for mass brands like Target and Levi's, high-end brands are now recognizing the value of these now you see us, now you don't stores.

A great way to make something special is to make it only available for a limited time. Maybe that's why there's a new kind of luxury boutique popping up -- the kind that swiftly disappears.

According to WWD:
"Europe's luxury players are suddenly enamored with more modest, temporary stores. ... Vuitton, which opened a temporary store in Tokyo last winter to showcase a collaboration with Comme des Garçons and its iconoclastic designer Rei Kawakubo, will open another time-limited retail venture in the Japanese capital later this month while the French brand awaits a permanent location at the new Seibu Ikebukuro department store in 2010. ... The temporary store will look the part: surrounded by scaffolding, wrapped in white mesh and with a raw interior with sections defined by stacked wooden crates (although the products themselves will sit on elegant, padded shelves)."


"The idea is to show only some items of our collection. The entire collection is available in the Chanel boutiques of that city," Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion at Chanel, told WWD. Chanel is opening a temporary shop in Moscow later this month at a multibrand store called Podium.

Hermes will be "popping up" at 63 Main Street in East Hampton, N.Y. on Wednesday (tomorrow) for a four-month stint.

What do you think?