Johannesburg - If you’re a shopaholic – and even if you’re not – you’ll have noticed how fashionable Gauteng has suddenly become.
From Prada and Louis Vuitton to Paris Hilton and Tiger of Sweden, there is hardly an international label out there that you can’t find in a mall these days.
This month especially, fashion editors have been kept busy with a series of fashion retailer launches, mostly at Sandton City’s dazzling new R185-million Diamond Walk.
To much fanfare, the Diamond Walk opened this month and now houses a host of flagship stores of the world’s most coveted fashion brands, including Prada, Ermenegildo Zegna, Billionaire Italian Couture, Dolce & Gabbana, Giorgio Armani, Burberry, Jimmy Choo, Gucci and Arque Champagne Crescent.
It doesn’t stop there. At Menlyn Park shopping mall in Pretoria, a new fashion wing opened early this month, a triple-level smorgasbord of over 100 cutting edge fashion brands including Paris Hilton, C-Squared, Geri, Superdry and Palladium – all firsts for Pretoria.
And at Cresta mall, new space is being created in its current upgrade to give access to new retailers, many of whom are fashion, shoe and accessory brands.
Meanwhile, The Zone @ Rosebank is undergoing a R500m revamp that will elevate its already trendy status as a fashion hub, where tenants include Diesel, Guess, Forever New, YDE and Republik. This follows the huge redevelopment of Rosebank Mall, anchored by Stuttafords, Edgars and Woolworths as well as dozens of smaller boutiques like Lipsy London, Jo Borkett and Kurt Geiger.
Elegant Hyde Park mall is also in on the act, with its opening last week of a luxury Tiger of Sweden concept store. This Scandanavian brand is all about beautifully tailored suits for men and women, competing mostly with Hugo Boss.
The investments being made are nothing short of awesome. Aside from the stratospheric rentals some of these retailers are willing to pay, spending on their shop spaces is on a grand scale. The Diamond Walk Prada store, for one, is now Prada’s biggest in the world, covering 800m2 and featuring black and white marble chequered flooring, crystal tables and velvet sofas.
Then there’s the price tags. A black and white shift dress by Prada can cost a cool R24 000, and the media made the most of the Louis Vuitton crocodile leather handbag tagged at R400 000.
So why all this proliferation of fashion and splurging? The answer lies partly in the fact that the rich are getting richer in South Africa.
According to Sandton wealth intelligence company New World Wealth, South Africa has 46 800 millionaires, each with a net worth of $1m (about R12m).
But also, the middle class is growing fast, and it has more disposable income than in the past. The largest share of this growth is among black South Africans, and designer labels enjoy high spending priority, economists have found.
Marius Muller, chief executive of Pareto Limited, South Africa’s premier shopping centre investor and co-owner of Menlyn Park with Old Mutual Properties, says that like malls around the country, Menlyn Park has experienced “phenomenal growth in recent years, attracting the best local and international brand retailers, to appeal to the city’s rapidly expanding middle- to upper-class markets”.
Above-inflation wages and a relatively low inflation rate means that people in these brackets have more disposable income, he says, and retailers are responding robustly to the demand.
The Zone complements and competes with neighbouring The Firs and Rosebank Mall, as well as other sub-regional centres including Killarney Mall, Melrose Arch, Norwood Mall and Hyde Park. However, all of these centres are enjoying excellent year-on-year trade, “driven by growing retailer and consumer demand and a relatively buoyant consumer economy”, says Peter Levett, chief executive of Old Mutual Properties.
Suffice to say, South Africa is very much the new frontier for premier fashion brands in Europe, UK and the US.
“Before we opened our first store in 2009 in Melrose Arch, we didn’t have South Africa on the map. But since we entered the country, performance has been very good,” says Jonas Windahl, Tiger of Sweden’s brand manager in South Africa. “The middle class are getting stronger here and they are increasingly aware of fashion.
“We have found that South Africans are very astute about quality especially.”
The increasing presence of international brands presents quite a challenge to local fashion retailers, of course. As Muller observes: “South Africans have had a taste of what’s on offer from the world’s top retail brands and they want more… we’re seeing many of our local retailers vulnerable in the face of this competition. So it’s important that we create greater diversity in our tenant mixes.”
So beyond labels from the US, Europe and the UK, Pareto is looking to entice brands from places like Turkey and the Middle East to South Africa.
“We believe there will be great opportunities for these retailers here, and they will find a good fit with our shoppers,” says Muller.
The upshot of this explosion of fashion is that shoppers now have an unprecedented variety of brands to choose from, and an ever-increasing number of labels to become familiar with, ranging from luxury eveningwear to streetwear, shoes to accessories. So there’s no excuse to not look like a Londoner, New Yorker, Parisian or Swede. The only question is, can you afford to keep up with the latest fashion?
Helen Grange, The Star