bunnyshop shopping fashion blog

Shopping in London: Reader Mail

In today's Reader Mail:

So...I seem to remember reading somewhere that you've visited London quite a few times. Well, I have a NINE hour lay-over at Heathrow airport's international terminals (landing at terminal 1 & then catching another flight at terminal 2) and I want to know if there's anything interesting I should check out. Like, for example, I would tell someone visiting Portland airport to check out the mini-Powell's bookstore & the Good Dog/Bad Dog sausage restaurant.  Any good tips for London?

xo
AM

Possibly our favorite question of all time! Er, we love them all equally. Just maybe a tiny bit more. We think we are going to make Thursdays "Traveling Thursdays" around here. (Please send in your travel questions! We are officially, as on our tax forms which we are totally not dealing with at all at the moment, officially a travel writer!)

Anyhoo:

This is what we would do. If you can afford it, and it's not cheap—the roundtrip ("return") fare is about $56!—take the Heathrow Express to Paddington—it's only 15 minutes and they run every 15 minutes. (The other alternatives are the middle way-ish Heathrow Connect and then the Piccadilly line Tube into central London, but the latter can take well into an hour, though if we have time to spare, that's what we'll do.

Purists may disagree (and we want to hear from you) but we think we'd head straight for the Topshop at Oxford Circus. It's not like Oxford Street has any hipster cache (it has negative hipster cache). But when our sister came to London, Oxford Street was the first place we took her, and it addled her jetlagged mind. It's not super cheap but not too expensive, and all of our favorite things come from there. (We particularly like the denim, which even with the exchange rate blowing so hard at the moment is always under $100.) We especially love the shoes, and they usually have a big Jocasi concessions. Also, the jackets. And the tops. You see where this is going.

From there, we'd go about a half-block east to the Urban Outfitters, which really does have different (and better) lines from the US original. And then sort of set off a block from Oxford Street is the "fashion book store" RD Franks, which is completely amazing.

And then I'd also go down Carnaby Street, which is also right nearby. The first Jocasi store is there, as well as a small branch of our favorite yoga studio, Triyoga. (Nine hours + yoga = better.) If you can find Triyoga there's a cute vintage shop right below, as well as Super Superficial, an adorable t-shirt store we've covered here before. And then you're right around the corner from Liberty—we can't afford much of it, but the building's beautiful and the selection is top-notch.

Now! That's what we'd do. (Did we mention lunch at Eat? It's across the street from the ATM where we always see the Topshop sales staff.) Er, we just realized that this is completely shopping based. Mm, just culturally we'd go to the Tate Modern or the British Museum. We can't believe we just reduced a city we love to shopping. Actually, with prolly five hours (once travel time's considered) to go, we'd probably hop on one of the sight-seeing buses, we love them. And we'll say that if we, personally, had that time to spare, we'd go to the Triyoga in Primrose Hill, and then spend the rest of the time just sort of looking around up there and going to the pub on the bridge that we cannot remember the name of even though we have been there like 10 million times.

And we have like five million other suggestions. Argh!

 

Who else has ideas?

 

Jo Malone In London

We are totally obsessed with Jo Malone at the moment. It just all feels so nice and springtime-y. And expensive. We went into the shop today, and for some reason they had decided to staff a girl directly in front of the door, so that it was actually not possible to open the door without sort of half-opening it and then waiting for her to move. This became more curious after she moved to let us in, and then went right back. Bizarre. We once went to dinner with an art school friend, to a nice restaurant in Brooklyn (thereby crossing the streams in a way that had blow-everything-up-Ghostsbusters-style potential) and he said that one of the owners was looking at him meanly the whole time. We thought he was imagining things, and said so, but we are sure this doorguard-shopgirl was giving us the Evil Eye the entire time we were there. Once we'd gotten tired of being stared down, from the doorway of a perfume shop, we made our way out, but not before passing the Fragrance Testing Booth, which looked like a photo booth but with fragrance.

Obviously, we could not pass this up. The doorguard-shopgirl said it was broken. We are not sure we believe her. Tss.

Anyway! Jo Malone. Hopefully Jo herself is not as much of a cranky doorguard as at least one member of her staff. This is the thing we like to do when we go shopping in London: We go out, and find things we like, and we do not bring our credit cards with us, because then we would buy them. Instead, we go back home and find them for sale online in the US and buy them there, and save our money.

We really, really, really love the Red Roses cologne. 30ml = $50. That is so little perfume for so much money. However. We also quite like the honeysuckle and jasmine.

And: this is totally about to become our late-self-xmas-present. If we can somehow justify spending sixty-five dollars on a candle. Er, maybe not. Grapefruit home candle, $65

Muji In London

Muji! We love Muji because everything is adorable, and most of it is so inexpensive. It is full of things we had previously known that we needed, including this bag of little wooden New York things:

New York in a bag, about $10. Also available: Paris, London, Tokyo, suburbs (on sale in the stores) and countryside (ditto).

We had forgotten how big the range is after just going to the Muji mini-shop at MoMA's design store. This is much better.

And! These are collapsible cardboard speakers (about $40). Everything at this store is so much smarter than we are.

Shrink-wrap t-shirts! That is pretty much how we are at Muji, just walking around with little exclamation points coming out of our head. Sadly not available in women's sizes. Shrink-wrap t-shirts, about $20

But everything is adorable, and there's enough stuff to offer an afternoon's worth of distractions ... like this adorable teapot for $5!!!

The Best Store in the Freaking World

It seemed like as good a time as any to do this little post we've been sitting on for ages: Topshop. Top 25 Best Stores in London. Quite Possibly Best Store in World. You know, we hate to be in such a believe-the-hype situation, contrary malcontents that we are, but: It really is a little bit like heaven. In fact, we wrote a book, and we finished it at the Topshop cafe. (Speaking of: Who knows an editor at a major publishing house who wants to publish a book, particularly one finished at the Topshop cafe? Send them our way and we'll build you a little altar in our bedroom and pray to it every single night, not that that's, like, sacrilegious or weird or anything.) Anyway: Topshop. We said "As good a time as any" really meaning "better than usual," because of the London Fashion Week-timed announcement that Kate Moss will be doing a little KM-for-TS collection. Can you imagine? Seriously? We really can't. We hesitate to use the words "off the hook." However. Off. The. Hook.

What can you say about TS? Honestly, we don't know. All of our favorite things come from Topshop. Here is all we will say: that minidress we were talking about last week? We wore it again, wind be damned, to our first hair salon interview, and the whole time we were like, "Well, this really is quite short," but more people told us we looked nice that day than possibly any day previously, ever. And yeah, part of this is because we're wearing a skirt that comes down to our upper-to-mid thigh, so whatever—and this is completely true—but this guy walking past us sort of turned around to, who knows, take a look at the dress, and we noticed this as we were drinking from a can of Diet Coke, and we sort of laugh, seeing him do this, which interrupts the stream of Diet Coke going into our mouths, which means we're sort of hiccupping Diet Coke all over ourselves and our dress. Now who wouldn't want to buy a book so chock-full of touching moments? We ask you.

U.S. people can't buy from the website yet, though supposedly this will change in 2007. (Original reporting, hurrah!) But: ebay.co.uk. We do what we must.

The details:
Store: Topshop
Address: The flagship is at 216 Oxford Street, Oxford Circus tube
Phone: 020 7636 7700
Our favorite thing: Everything, everything, everything. Except some of the tank tops, which fit us a little funny. That's probably just us, tho.

Our 25 Favorite London Stores: Habitat

POST-SCRIPT WE ARE PUTTING AT THE TOP: Yesterday we were on a Circle Line train, and there appeared this American family with four hyperactive blond children screaming and jumping up and down and racing from one end of the car to the other. A nice British man asked the father, "Is that the child's ticket?" pointing to something that fell from one of the horror-rapscallion's pockets, and the father barely acknowledged his niceness. And they shouted, just shouted and shouted, about everything from how to work the digital camera to which stop they'd be alighting at, and when they finally did leave, two British people, one of whom looked exactly like Martin Freeman, made fun of them for the next five stops, and we were like, "We are perfectly fine with that. You just go ahead as much as you like." We don't mind tourist-hatred as long as it is particular and individual, rather than sweeping and general-like.

Er, back to the original post:

Today we were quietly walking down Oxford Street, minding our own business, doing our best to keep our imperalist tendencies and our braying American accents to ourselves, when a woman in a terrible pair of red clown pants shouts, just shouts: "I can't wait until summer's over and all these Americans go home." Now, we've never walked down Broadway and said, even silently, for that matter, "Goddamn fucking British tourists," because we absolutely love the British. Their words, their ways, their chocolate snacks. Their sandwiches. Really, everything about them. The way the Tube tells you how long it will be until the next train comes. We love our yoga teacher, Joey Miles, who should be everyone's yoga teacher. (And if you are looking for a yoga teacher in London, we could not recommend him, or his partner Laurel Sutherland, more highly.) We love the number 210 bus that takes to Brent Cross. We love Topshop and Selfridge's and all the museums and all the parks and even, quite possibly most of all, Sunday roasts and Yorkshire pudding and Big Brother and the Great North Eastern Railway. We only hate, and we just hate, that one woman, who could not even be bothered to be subtle in her disdain. Really, the subtlety, the quiet resentment, is all we're looking for. We're used to the eye-rolling when people hear our accent. We're just not into the open, shouty whining. Argh. We would have beaten her with the nearest available stick, but that would have been too much of a cliche.

Anyhoo, that is a rather crap beginning to our little mini-series of our favorite stores in London. Today we are talking about Habitat, which we adore, like we do everything single British thing except for the America-hating woman in the red clown pants. What we love most about them in the moment is their Very Important Products line, with celebrity designers like Eley Kishimoto (above right), Matthew Williamson (above left), and Orla Kiely (at top) making wallpaper. (Moderately less brilliant: Ewan McGregor, though we love him, designing a director's chair.) Otherwise: brilliant!

So of course, and annoyingly, none of this is available in the U.S., but there are some very nice things available on eBay. But, as our friend so cannily, and loudly, noted, there are Americans all over London at the moment, and all of us would do well to bellow our loud, braying voices throughout Habitat's new store on Regent Street, which is unbelievably beautiful and also includes an organist (picture below) and a public bathroom (picture not available) in its nice cafe.

The details:

Store: Habitat
Address: 121-123 Regent Street
Phone: 020 7287 6525
Our favorite thing: The Orla Kiely wallpaper, about $20 a roll