An amusing, possibly apocryphal but entirely believable, story is told about a visitor three years ago to the Guggenheim Museum's branch in New York's SoHo district. In order to reach the tills where admission tickets to exhibitions are sold, it is first necessary to pass through the museum's shop. Arriving at the head of the queue for such a ticket, the visitor announced he also wanted to buy an object displayed in the reception area. It was explained to him that the item in question was actually part of a show of post-war French art.
This is an excellent example of the blurring which has occurred of late between art and commerce, between culture and recreation. It is a blur which has permitted an elementary and deeply uninteresting activity like shopping to be reinvented as a crucial form of urban social activity. And, in turn, this reinvention has meant that architects, the majority of whom would have despised an invitation to design a retail outlet, are now likely to see such a commission as being, quite literally, the ideal shop window for their talents.
The retail division which has come to be most closely associated with new architecture is fashion. There are a number of reasons for this, not least the pretensions of fashion to be an art form, as exemplified by the retrospective exhibition of Giorgio Armani's work held at the main, Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum in New York last winter.
But in addition - and in contradiction to the form's own aspirations - from the late 1980s, fashion ceased to be driven primarily by questions of design and became preoccupied instead with marketing and advertising.
Today, one season of clothes produced by a large, successful fashion corporation looks little different from another. Therefore, an alternative means of achieving distinction in the marketplace had to be discovered. Hence the emergence of the shop as statement of intent. While the products on offer may be remarkably similar to those found everywhere else, the context in which they are displayed provides the consumer with a better understanding of the brand's sense of personal identity. An outlet stocking mass-market denim and sportswear, for example, will share few characteristics with one selling expensive, luxurious clothes.
For the potential customer, the appearance of the shop offers clues about the nature of the goods and whether they will be worth purchasing. Despite the very obvious nature of this design philosophy, it seems to have remained relatively little understood until the late 1980s.
Up to that, architects, such as Nigel Coates, may have taken on the job of creating fashion outlets but the result was intended primarily to reflect the interests of the designer; it was something of an insider's joke which clued-in consumers were expected to share.
But a premises such as that designed by Coates in 1988 for the Katherine Hamnett label on London's Sloane Street - in which most of the window was occupied by stacked (and stocked) fish-tanks - offered little help to the average shopper about whether or not to step inside. Coates now works, albeit in a more subdued format, for the Jigsaw chain.
Around the same time he undertook the Hamnett job, another British architect, David Chipperfield, was invited to design a London store for Issey Miyake. Chipperfield used to claim he accepted such work simply because he was offered very little else. However, by the middle of the last decade, his aesthetic, in which fashion was frequently treated as a work of art, had become widely adopted.
Chipperfield's latest clients are the Italian duo, Dolce & Gabbana, for whom he has designed a number of premises around the world, with more on the way. The fashion label is noted for the baroque excess of its clothing, but this is scarcely apparent in the Chipperfield shops, except for the decorative elements, such as ornately moulded gilt mirrors.
Otherwise, it would be difficult to distinguish one of these outlets from many others on Milan's Via Spiga, London's Bond Street or New York's Madison Avenue.
The reality is that the process of retail design initiated by Chipperfield and quickly taken up (and taken to its logical conclusion) by other architects, such as John Pawson and Claudio Silvestrin, has run its course and lapsed into cliche.
There is scarcely a mass-market chain which has not adopted the style of white walls, pale wood floors, free-standing units and wide expanses of glass. While the form may be done with better materials and to a higher standard of finish in such spaces as Pawson's Calvin Klein shop in New York and Silvestrin's Giorgio Armani site in Paris, the truth remains that when architecture becomes enmeshed with fashion, it suffers from the same problem of short shelf life. Minimalist retail design, so fresh and invigorating in the early 1990s, now seems absurdly outmoded and repetitive.
So what does the future hold in this area? It is interesting that many of those architects who formerly embraced fashion with such enthusiasm are now attempting to distance themselves from it. David Chipperfield, for example, now designs museums and galleries - oddly enough, a field with which the big global fashion houses are also becoming increasingly associated. And elements of quirkiness are creeping into retail design as a means of providing further differentiation; one of the most discussed fashion outlets in the past few years has been the Comme des Garcons store, designed in 1999 by Future Systems, in New York's West Chelsea, where the entrance is an aluminium recess in the brick wall.
One of fashion's abiding traits is its rapacious tendency to consume ideas and images and then move on; architecture is therefore liable to be perceived as simply another commodity in the search for a greater return on the retail investment. Architects engaging with fashion should be aware that their contribution is unlikely to be treated with an abiding respect.
Fashion & Architecture, compiled by Helen Castle, is published by Wiley-Academy, £19.99 in the UK.