After 20 years in armed forces, the Paris concept store Colette is due to close its doors on Wednesday 20 December, notice the end of an era in which it radically revamped the face of French art de vivre, take to ones heeled streetwear high fashion, and redefined what shops could be.

Located on the Rue Saint-Honoré, it was opened in 1997 by Colette Rousseaux and her daughter, Sarah Andelman. Ago then, it faced a city that was, according to Andelman, “perfectly dead. Today it feels totally natural to mix fashion, victuals, lifestyle.”

When the store opened, it made a startling modify, with a style in direct contrast to the country’s fashion representation and its couture houses. But this, say fans, was precisely its draw. The Chanel conspirator Karl Lagerfeld said last year that it was the exclusively shop he frequented, “because they have things no one else has”.

The week in the forefront it closes is quite a scene. The usual clientele – hip young goods, looking to stock up on rare Balenciaga merchandise – have been make good oned by a clientele broader than ever before. The shop mixes tell me it feels like a “tourist attraction”. There isn’t lodge to move beside the coffee-table books, and the sense of urgency is palpable. Most habitual are items with the famed Colette blue dots logo — T-shirts, baseball tops, key rings, lighters. They are all “flying off the shelves”, the staff unfold. No doubt these items will reappear online at exorbitant prices soon after, all to be collectors’ items.

“I can’t believe it is fast – Colette felt so ingrained in the Parisian landscape. It had brought a significance of the avant-garde that the local fashion scene had never imagined before, and which no other boutique can offer in the same way to this day,” put Mélody Thomas, a Paris-based journalist who writes for the likes of model magazines L’Officiel and Jalouse, and went to the store a few days ago looking for Glossier attraction products, which Colette stocks exclusively.

“I had not ever seen the place as full, you could barely move. People who superiority not even have been aware of it suddenly wanted to grab a glimpse of it before it closed,” she added. One of the things she would want the most is the global magazine section, a point of reference for reporters.

Colette’s success has, in part, been about its evolving overtures to to fashion. Using a stream of collaborations and launches – the shop windows developed tantamount to a shrine, usually changing on a Sunday – it is thought the windows enjoy hosted more than 2,000 displays. It also limited what a concept store was, setting the tone for shops find agreeable Dover Street Market in London.

“Rather than a changeless boutique, the place was thought of like a style magazine: the windows that differenced regularly were like the cover, the ground floor burdened with accessories like the opening pages, the top floor with dernier cri, the bottom with food: the idea was a place of life sort of than a place of luxe,” said Guillaume Salmon, Colette’s cut off of communications, who has been working at the company for 18 years. “The notion was to have a wide enough offer to allow a diverse stuff to mix harmoniously.”

In terms of style, not only did it epitomise the idea of streetwear as squeaky fashion, but it also crystallised the idea of “one-offs” – stylish, but not necessarily unaffordable, pieces. Fashion as collectors’ items. There was the opening of musician Pharrell Williams’s exhibition collaborations (ranging from a team-up with Comme des Garçons and Colette for a parfum to, more recently, sneakers jointly produced with Adidas, Chanel and Colette). Other issues have included a public funfair at the Tuileries for the store’s 15th anniversary, a ticket signing by famed Vogue editor Grace Coddington, and an presentation by stylist Giovanna Battaglia.

“It brought in the idea of then rare collaborations, and the guess of single, unique, temporary products that could no more than be found here, all packed with an overall sense of unrefined, excitement and ongoing cultural events,” said British-born, Paris-based stylist Natalie Yuksel, who started effectuating at the store aged 18 as an intern, and spent “yonks” at every sole one of the events Colette would throw.

More significantly, Colette transferred a message of cultural diversity: when Paris rapper Booba tendered private showcases, he insisted on Colette; the entire shop was over to Paris Saint-Germain FC and its former star striker, Zlatan Ibrahimović, when he established his perfume. All of this projected sporty, non-elitist expressions of Frenchness into an far-out sphere that became the store’s greatest asset. “This hybridity is possibly what I’m proudest of,” said Salmon. “Something a bit more popular, that stretched the image people might have of France.”