Top of the Shops: Farfetch.com
Where to begin with farfetch.com? It’s like super Top of the Shops! An online directory of independent, fashion forward, high end boutiques from all over the world, that you can also buy from. Browse the rails of a boutique in Copenhagen then have your purchase shipped to you. Throw Lonely Planet away and use the list of boutiques by location to plan a city break.
The site works by appearing at first as a conventional online boutique – all fashion bases are covered by splitting the list of brands into three categories; Luxe, Lab and Contemporary, depending on whether you are looking for luxury, experimental or casual. The twist is that once you’ve found your 7 For All Mankind skinny jeans, they aren’t shipped from a warehouse but from an independent boutique named Spinnaker 141 in San Remo, Italy. How exciting! And why not click on Spinnaker 141 and see what else it stocks? Woops, there are a trillion items in my basket.
Which leads us neatly to the inevitable downside – this is definitely a high end website that is designed (it seems) to invoke outfit lust even more than its conventional counterparts, with the added impression of finding something special and unique. In fact, the brands stocked are mostly the large luxury labels and diffusion lines you would expect with really only the international element lifting the interest factor.
For shopping geeks however, the best part of the site remains the boutique directory featuring historical gems and fun facts about long-established independents like Browns (London, 1970), Traffic (LA, 1979) and many more.
- Carys Kirkpatrick
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