London fashion has always been defined by a mood of eclecticism, where the establishment – the meticulous precision of Savile Row, Knightsbridge’s gleaming department stores – meets the convention-breaking, from the punkish glamour of Vivienne Westwood to Alexander McQueen’s savage beauty, or the playful, idiosyncratic approach of Jonathan Anderson.
When it comes to shopping in the city, you will find a similarly diverse offering – from big-name boutiques and classic department stores to the best in vintage, alongside the sleek and experimental – which continues to draw international shoppers off their phones and onto the streets. Here, as London Fashion Week S/S 2025 begins in the city today (13 September 2024), Wallpaper* selects the very best fashion stores London has to offer.
A guide to the best fashion stores London has to offer
Dover Street Market
(Image credit: Courtesy of Dover Street Market)
Moving from its eponymous Dover Street address to Haymarket in 2016 – a short walk from the busy Piccadilly Circus – Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe’s conceptual fashion market remains London’s most thought-provoking boutique. Across the vast 31,000 sq ft space, Dover Street Market London shoppers will find not only pieces from the various Comme des Garçons lines (Kawakubo is also the founder and creative director of the Japanese label), but an array of brands spanning streetwear, luxury houses, and the international avant-garde, as well as plenty of rising talent. ‘People’s expectations rise and you have to rise with them. The question is how do we make DSM even more surprising and create something that you don’t expect?’ Joffe told Wallpaper* when the store opened. Indeed, traversing the labyrinthine space, which unfolds over five floors, reveals hidden displays and spaces – head all the way to the top and you’ll be rewarded by a London outpost of the Parisian Rose Bakery, where cakes and pastries line the steel countertop. Read more.
18–22 Haymarket, London, SW1Y 4DG.
london.doverstreetmarket.com
Alaïa
(Image credit: Courtesy of Alaïa. © Steven Shearer)
Fashion and art unite in Alaïa’s sleek London flagship, seeing a changing roster of artists – including Sarah Lucas, Thomas Ruff, Steven Shearer and Sterling Ruby – line the space’s gallery-like white walls (the selection is curated by creative director Pieter Mulier). Meanwhile, in an echo of house founder Azzedine Alaïa’s meticulous eye for interiors, Marc Newson’s ‘Pelota’ lamps, chairs by Gerrit Rietveld, Gio Ponti and Franco Albini, and tables by Shiro Kuramata populate the two-storey space, providing a satisfying backdrop for Mulier’s latest clothing and accessories collections. Another nod to the late Azzedine Alaïa comes in an industrially designed kitchen on the second floor – a reference to the late couturier’s Paris home, where he would memorably host home-cooked dinners for his creative milieu of friends and muses. Read more.
139 New Bond St, London, W1S 2TL.
maison-alaia.com
Climax
(Image credit: Photography by Jacob Lillis, courtesy of Climax)
Though not a fashion store per se, Climax bookstore has become a favourite with fashion industry insiders – so much so, it has collaborated with Heaven by Marc Jacobs and, most recently, Chopova Lowena on a capsule collection. Founded by former Dazed editor-in-chief and current Acne Studios chief marketing officer Isabella Burley, it promises an array of rare and out-of-print tomes, focussing on photography, erotica and counterculture, as well as objects and ephemera. ‘It’s about us not just being seen as a second-hand bookstore but having a world, a kind of universe around us that encompasses many different things, not just books,’ Burley told Wallpaper* after opening a New York Climax earlier this month (September 2024). ‘I think books are the foundation of Climax and what we’ve been trying to do, but it’s really fun to think: what is Climax beyond that?’ As such, as well as collaborations, Climax is also a burgeoning publishing house, with Martine Syms and Del LaGrace Volcano monographs in the works.
Climax Books HQ, 5 Wardour Mews, London, W1F 8AL.
climaxbooks.com
Harrods
(Image credit: Courtesy of Burberry)
Steadily approaching two centuries in business, the 1849-founded department store Harrods is a stalwart of London shopping, long attracting hordes of tourists to the Knightsbridge address – whether seeking teddy bears, tea or tote bags, and particularly so when the 19th-century exterior is illuminated for Christmas with its signature rows of string lights. Though recent years have seen Harrods shake off its somewhat stodgy reputation, as it has drafted in a slew of big-name brands for blockbuster takeovers – among them Dior (a gingerbread world for Christmas), Louis Vuitton (complete with an enormous Yayoi Kusama), and Burberry (a blue-lit facade and Burberry-clad porters). This is alongside a promised £200 million renovation of the store’s fashion areas – including an already-completed lingerie and sleepwear area designed by David Collins Studio with all the marble and gleaming glass you would expect, and a near-encyclopedic menswear department on the lower ground floor.
87-135 Brompton Road, London, SW1X 7XL.
harrods.com
Celine
(Image credit: George Harvey)
A ‘carnival of materials, furniture and art’ is how Wallpaper’s Dal Chodha described the Hedi Slimane-designed Celine outpost on London’s Bond Street. Indeed, the gleaming space features opulent panels of marble, white walls and neoclassical mouldings, alongside a selection of contemporary art and furniture that reflects Slimane’s singular vision as creative director of the house, which combines classical French luxury and savoir-faire with a countercultural flair. For a truly intimate encounter with the store’s catalogue of artworks, seek out the men’s fitting room which features the 1670 oil painting Portrait of Maximilien de Bethune Duc de Sully of the Flemish school – surely a changing room first. Read more.
40 New Bond Street, London, W1S 2RX.
celine.com
Rellik
(Image credit: Courtesy of Rellik (via @rellikvintage))
Located on west London’s Golborne Road in the shadow of the Ernő Goldfinger-designed Brutalist Trellick Tower, vintage store Rellik is the domain of Fiona Stuart, Steven Philips and Claire Stansfield, who have long sourced some of the city’s most unique vintage finds – from punk-era Vivienne Westwood to rare Maison Martin Margiela, Azzedine Alaïa, and John Galliano, as well as 1930s underwear, costume jewellery and millinery. A spirit of anarchy still defines the small, busy store, though it has become beloved by establishment names from Kate Moss to Kim Jones, and was recently taken over by Valentino for the house’s vintage exchange project.
8 Golborne Road, London, W10 5NW.
relliklondon.co.uk
Balenciaga
(Image credit: Leon Chew)
Step in Balenciaga’s Bond Street store and you might be mistaken for thinking you have stepped into a site that is still in construction. Indeed the raw concrete walls – each one painstakingly ‘distressed’ by hand – were made to recall ‘the warehouse, the carpark, the emptied gallery – places that have hosted a palimpsest of activities,’ said Niklas Bildstein Zaar and Andrea Faraguna of the Berlin-based studio Sub, who collaborated with Balenciaga creative director Demna on the space. It makes shopping akin to walking onto a film set, leaving you to wonder what is real and what is fake, all the way down to the patina of rust on enormous concrete girders. Demna calls it ‘raw architecture’, and it makes for a shopping experience like no other. Read more.
24-25 New Bond Street, London, W1S 2RR.
balenciaga.com
The Row
(Image credit: Courtesy of The Row)
The Row’s London outpost is an exercise in refinement: which other store in London greets you with one of James Turrell’s glowing orbs in the entranceway? Elsewhere, a tasteful array of objects and furniture adore the airy space, a reflection of the design-focussed universe Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have curated at their 2006-founded label. Located just off Mount Street – an afternoon of shopping in itself – it makes for a serene haven in which to peruse the brand’s men’s and womenswear collections, which marry ascetic design with enveloping fabrications and flourishes of craft and play. And it’s only getting better. But so is demand – with searches up 93 per cent on Lyst, we advise befriending store staff to get a heads up on new arrivals.
5 Carlos Place, London, W1K 2EY
therow.com
Aries
(Image credit: Photography by Louise Melchior, courtesy of Aries)
Aries founder Sofia Prantera envisages the skatewear brand’s Soho outpost as a kind of ‘library’ for its community, hosting not only its collections but an outpost of Paris café Paperboy, a bookstore, and a vast basement which can be transformed for events and screenings. Meanwhile, the store design echoes what she calls the ‘temple and the rat’ ethos of Aries (a reference to Fergus Purcell’s playful graphics for the brand), seeing the brand traverse the worlds of luxury design and streetwear. Here, a marble staircase references Carlo Scarpa’s Venetian architecture, while sparse concrete floors, strip lighting and scaffold poles meet luxurious Italian furniture. ‘[Since the beginning], our identity is all about this duality – the elevated temple and the decay of the rat,’ Prantera told Wallpaper* when the store opened. Read more.
31 Great Pulteney Street, London, W1F 9NN.
ariesarise.com
Baraboux
(Image credit: Courtesy of Baraboux (via @baraboux))
Sarah Faisel, owner of the east London-based vintage store Baraboux, has fashion in her blood. Named after a fashion business run by her mother – which then sold leather goods and handbags – Faisel has since turned Baraboux into a fashion archive which collates a sleek edit of pieces which lean towards 1990s minimalism (in stock currently, S/S 1990 Prada capri shorts, a Maison Martin Margiela ‘sock boot’ from A/W 1999, and plenty of Helmut Lang). Housed in Hackney’s Netil House (by appointment only), Faisel says that ‘in a world of excess, Baraboux aims to provide just what you need: nothing more and nothing less’.
Netil House, 1 Westgate St, London E8 3RL.
baraboux.com
JW Anderson
(Image credit: Olivia Estebanez)
Soho is not the typical address for a fashion store, though Jonathan Anderson – lover of the strange and the idiosyncratic – is no ordinary designer. Housed next door to the ‘Las Vegas’ amusement arcade in a former corner shop, the JW Anderson store features gleaming neon lights (a nod to its neighbour) alongside sleek shelving housing the brand’s famed accessories, like the Bumper bag. A more enveloping basement level features curtains of fabric and rough plaster walls, which 6a architect Tom Emerson (who designed the space) says is ‘how you might finish a London basement that you would never expect anyone to see’. ‘As much as everyone is consumed with the online experience, it’s still important to have a physical space,’ Anderson told Wallpaper when it opened in early 2020. ‘It’s kind of like porn somehow. Everyone can get porn online but they still come into Soho. Everyone can get fashion online but they will still come into Soho.’ Read more.
2 Brewer Street, London, W1F 0SA.
jwanderson.com