My Hong Kong shopping tales continue and as tiresome as it's getting, at least here, there will be a feast of eye candy (or cutie loooor!) that doesn't require a plane ticket to the Far East to appreciate.
The word 'chains' isn't necessarily an evil one in Hong Kong. Most people who have shopped in HK will have come across an I.T. or i.t. store or shops that are operated by the I.T. Group (Tsumori Chisato, A.P.C., Beams Boy etc...). I wouldn't say I necessarily experience pedestrian monotony in said stores even if there is something of an I.T. takeover all over the small space of HK.
And this certainly isn't the case for uuu...shooop!!! (you can do that annoying upper/lower case thing if you please but I had enough of that when I was on ICQ) which has five stores in HK. Finding info on the store, the brand has proved to be a bit of a mouseclick hell given that the website is laden with flash and bits of broken code everywhere. I still haven't got it quite right but here goes... the parent company is called 'magasin d'univers' (established in 1997 apparently...) and it houses the labels uuu...shooop!!!, which is the name of the stores that are dotted around Hong Kong, and another label Iig-Loo.
Actually, cut the fashion family tree crap out. Let the uuu...shooop peeps tell it like it is...(this is directly copied from their Facebook page)
"We have no design plan,no direction,no reason,and nothing want to express. All of our product are only design for girls who like to dress up.that`s it! Please never waste time to ask why. Just concentrate on what we want to dress and cheer yourselves up! : )"
That's a big smiley faced ending by the way. Of course, a statement like that is irksome to people like me who is constantly asking WHY? WHATTY? WTF? I'll try and restrain my questions and simply say that everything in uuu...shooop's DNA, the shop interiors, branding, packaging and the pieces themselves are all geared to propel you into a world where it seems perfectly normal to wear five or more heavily texture/arisanal layers with slightly odd proportions that will give you the overall effect of looking like a folkloric cartoon character. This is more appealling than it sounds when you're actually in the store, mind you. The brain is conjuring up a million things when you're looking at their clothes and lookbooks; certain Hayao Miyazaki films and their wardrobing, hyper-folk, Scandinavian design, elements of Western period dressing, cottages, the imaginary clothes of Moomin (if they were to wear clothes...), Noddyville, forests... all of this added to the deliberately layered styling that the clothes are engineered for.
Some of you think I wear layers? Nay... one has not seen layering until you see the shop staff of uuu...shooop. In order to amp their commission sales, they even sell in ideas of layering to you that are admittedly doable... "You could wear these shorts over these leggings and maybe with the legwarmers too... and two pairs of socks too so that one peeks out over the other...."
Your head might conjure up different things as you scroll through these lookbook images... don't ask me to name seasons. There is no rhyme or reason other than they're all *I think * uuu...shooop collections, all given names like "Flying Castle of Captain J" OR "Rhapsody in Trzy Kolor"... like they said, don't ask why. Just dress up!
These are from the Iig Loo collection... the other line that's part of Magasin D'Univers...
You woulda thunk that in a shop, whose goal it is to drive people into walking out wearing 15 items at a time, I, of all people, would have gone crazy. Sadly, like the restraint I have to apply to asking the question "Why?", I also had to restrict my spending. So the effect of buying a pair of knitted shorts, leggings and a bi-chimney hat (yes, I do need TWO chimneys to let the steam out of my head...) isn't quite as multi-tiered as what uuu...shooop intended. I'll duly work on that though and hope that I too can "dress and cheer up!"
Here's one for the family album...
