Hong Kong Shopping – Part 1 – The Malls

So after a week of very hard work, I’ve now shopped Hong Kong. And it was great! It was stinking hot in HK, but the food was fabulous and shopping even better!

Hong Kong shopping can basically be split into two main areas: Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. Whilst we stayed on the Kowloon side of HK, its so easy with the MTR (Subway) to get around, we still managed to cover both sides pretty well, so today I present the first of my round up of shopping in Hong Kong! (warning: Its a long post, even split into three!!)

One thing I should point out is that this was my first trip to Hong Kong, so I’m sure we missed some hidden gems (feel free to tell me about them for my next trip though!)

Shopping Centres

Hong Kong Island

We checked out quite a few department stores in Hong Kong – The Landmark in Central was a favourite for me since it had two Marc Jacobs stores and  Juicy Couture store (hello, heaven on earth!) not to mention Dior, Harvey Nichols, a huge Louis Vuitton store and oodles of other high end stores I’ve probably missed. Just across the road was Marks and Spencer, which I was not really a fan of. Perhaps the English M&S is better, but I found the clothing to be bland and the shoes to be no great shakes either. The underwear section looked good, but with a…shall we say, generous bust, I have no chance of ever finding my size anywhere in Asia, so I don’t really bother looking.  There was also a HMV just next to the Landmark, although DVD’s weren’t cheap – Gossip Girl Season 1 was out, but at $80AUD I was willing to wait til it hit Australia.

Another good mall was the IFC mall , which was HUGE.  There was a massive Zara store, Godiva, and my new favourite store, City Super (left). City Super is a supermarket and general store rolled into one, and I loved it. I am a sucker for knick knacky stuff, of which there was heaps – for example,  my brother will soon be the proud owner of a smoking monkey (yes, it really smokes, but I don’t know how yet since I haven’t seem him to open it), there were lomo camera’s (Holga’s were $50AUD!), heaps of cute stationery goodies and a big beauty section. Seriously, City Super rocked. They also had a great deli section with freshly cooked fish, salads and sushi, which were excellent for eating healthily on the go. My recommendations is the Mrin baked Sea Bass, it was so tasty. My advice is to visit a few City Super’s as the stock is really different in all of them (and don’t assume you can find the smoking monkey’s at all – I wanted another and could not for the life of me remember which City Super I bought it at)

Kowloon

Over in Kowloon, my favourite shopping centre was Harbour City . Its located right near the Star Ferry Terminal (which has its own shopping centre attached to it) and was the home of Facess (to the right). Now, I’m not a beauty addict, but even my heart started to beat faster at the site of all those make up counters in one spot. MAC, NARS, Shu Uemura, Bliss – oh they were all there and the prices!! To give you a rough idea, my MAC foundation cost me $38AUD, MAC eye shadow pots were $20AUD and Shu Uemura Eyelash Curler was $16AUD. And if you still needed a further beauty fill, just outside Facess was Chanel Beaute and over the other side was Lane Crawford, which is Hong Kong’s high end department store which had even MORE make-up counters (I admit to spending ages playing at Smashbox. That’s one beauty brand I just love. They had two great specials – 6 full size lip glosses for $36AUD and a face and eye compact also for $36AUD). Harbour City also had a City Super, although not as good as the one over in the IFC Mall. Its definitely worth hitting the various City Super’s you see as they all carried different things.

We also headed out to Festival Walk in Kowloon Tong, mostly because I saw a Marc by Marc Jacobs bag on sale (70% off) and I stupidly didn’t snap it up, so I then dragged my poor cousin around to every one of the six Marc Jacobs stores in Hong Kong to find it (no, I never did. Let a lesson be learnt: If it’s Marc Jacobs and 70% off, just bloody buy it). We did come across Blair’s dress from the white party episode of Gossip Girl for $216AUD, however as a non-size 0, I had no hope of getting into it. It was so pretty though. I was utterly shattered to find that the Marc by Marc Jacobs Special Items collection was not stocked in Hong Kong (there went everyone’s cheap but fabulous souvenirs). Festival Walk also had the quietest H&M we came across. Oh, H&M. This was my first H&M experience and I loved it. The quality seemed to vary – some were quite good, some less so, but always the pricing was great. My best buy was a gorgeous thick wool, fully lined Magenta wool coat for $50AUD. It’s stunning. One thing to keep in mind with H&M though, we found the shoes in H&M to be a overpriced (by HK standards) and found pretty similar at the street markets for about the third of the price.

We didn’t end up visiting all the Shopping Centres – we skipped Elements entirely, and only briefly toured Pacific Place and Times Square. The one thing I found was that if a brand is in Hong Kong, they are in nearly every shopping centre, so by hitting a few, you’re still seeing the majority of stores.