The Great Shopping Showdown

Shopping in Sydney and Meblourne

The Great Shopping Showdown

Sydney's Retail Assests are brazenly displayed, but in Melbourne the finest gems are often hidden. Use this guide to get the best of both cities.

By Suzi Petkovski

Some friends from NSW said they were coming to Melbourne to shop. I had one question: Why? What can you get in Melbourne that you can’t get in Sydney?

After all, the Harbour City has come a long, long way since the days when everyone wore bike pants to dinner. Collette Dinnigan, Alex Perry, Akira Isogawa and Wayne Cooper are just some of the designers who have taken Sydney style to the world. Australian Fashion Week is in Sydney, not Melbourne. Oxford St is arguably the best shopping strip in the country. Castlereagh St has more Gucci-Pucci than you can poke a bejewelled walking stick at.

Melbourne has nothing to compare with the mega-domed Queen Victoria Building, named by Pierre Cardin – a Parisian no less - as the most beautiful shopping centre in the world. It’s Melbourne’s Block Arcade to the power of 10. Imagine Melbourne’s Exhibition Building converted into a shopping centre. Sure, many of the shops in the QVB are chain stores, but the flip side is you don’t need a platinum Amex to wander this cathedral of consumerism.

Whenever I take a trip north to Gotham City, I’m blinded by the bling. Sydney’s long, snaking streets seem to have more of everything than Melbourne. Including visitors. Sydney’s seduction job on international travellers (over 2.523 million in 2004, more than double Melbourne’s 1.2 million overseas visitors to June 2004) goes a long way to defining the two cities. Sydney’s Pacific Rim location means a more international outlook and more international labels to cater to an international shopper. Sydney also attracts the lion’s share of domestic visitors – 7.8 million in 2004, although Melbourne narrows the gap with 6.1 million Aussie visitors. But do the numbers tell the story? Is it game, set, match to Sydney in the shopping showdown?

Nikki Hall, a former Sydney resident who runs Hudson, a streetwear boutique in Melbourne’s Carlisle St, and co-authored a Sydney guide for Lonely Planet, thinks so. “Whenever international celebrities come to Melbourne and they get taken shopping, I can’t imagine where they’d go,” she says of her home town. “Unfortunately, Sydney has a bit more of everything than Melbourne. There are more people with money in Sydney, so there’s more choice. We don’t have as many millionaires and celebrities.”

Hall believes Sydney eclipsed Melbourne as a shopping mecca “the day Fox Studios opened [in 1998]. That’s the day international jetsetters flocked to Sydney and took a lot of money with them. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman [whose starring vehicles Mission Impossible 2 and Moulin Rouge respectively were shot on location in Sydney] seemed to be photographed in town every weekend.” It’s a short leap from celebrity culture to shopping trends. And celebrity spotting is a much bigger game in Sydney, says Hall, because “Sydney people believe their own hype. The Tele and Sydney Morning Herald have huge gossip pages that the Age and Herald-Sun here don’t have.”

A-listers are all-important in the shopping wars, but Sydney’s victory is far from a wrap. For Nene King, whose Retail Therapy column appears in the Melbourne Weekly Magazine, there isn’t even a contest. “Melbourne is one of the most wonderful shopping experiences in the world, not just better than Sydney!” declares the proud Melbourne gal. “I was shopping in New York recently. I didn’t fall over, except when I saw the prices.”

As queen of the women’s glossies at their peak, a former editor of Woman’s Day and The Australian Women’s Weekly, King lived in Sydney from 1987-99 and doesn’t have fond memories of the shopping experience. “When I lived in Sydney I had a hectic job, so shopping wasn’t a priority,” she admits. “If it wasn’t in David Jones or Grace Bros or Elizabeth St, I didn’t buy it.” Although she concedes Sydney attracts more international travellers and has lifted its shopping game, it still trails marvellous Melbourne. “Sydney doesn’t have as many attractive shopping centres and precincts,” she maintains.

“Melbourne is exciting because whether you’re in Port Melbourne or Sandringham or Kew, you’ll find fascinating little shops,” King explains. “You don’t find that in Sydney. There’s Oxford Street, I suppose. Mosman and Double Bay are overrated. Once you get away from the harbour, there’s not much to Sydney.”

“We tend to do more volume in Melbourne,” says Dean Rust of Shopping Spree Tours, whose mother Rhonda started the shopping-tour industry from her home in Melbourne 30 years ago. Shopping Spree Tours welcomed aboard 20,000 shopaholics for retail raids in Melbourne and Sydney in 2004, and saw a 29 percent increase in shoppers from NSW to Melbourne. “Sydney has a broader and bigger market in surf ware. Melbourne is the home of more sophisticated fashion. It’s a world-renowned city for fashion and the home of the rag trade.”

Melbourne has long cloaked itself in European sophistication – as against Sydney’s more relaxed hedonism. It’s an image of enduring appeal to retail therapists. Sydneysiders see Melbourne advertisements shot in arty black-and-white, like a Robert Doisneau composition, and feel a need to get in touch with their inner European. Of Melbourne’s interstate visitors (the key tourist market), no less than 51 percent come from NSW.

Having the luminous Megan Gale as the face of Melbourne Fashion Week “has put Melbourne right on the map as a world city and destination,” according to Dean Rust. Cheaper airfares through the emergence of Jetstar also help Melbourne’s retail sector, as does its well-known rep for being one of the world’s most liveable cities. “People used to think of Sydney and the Gold Coast as holiday destinations; now Melbourne is starting to come into its own,” says Rust. Sydney gets a bigger international spread of visitors but Melbourne gets more happy-spending New Zealanders.

The shopping smorgasbord may be bigger in Sydney, but shopping is a much more evolved and serious business in Melbourne. Sydney still has no Friday night trading. Are they for real?

“There are probably more serious designers in Melbourne,” observes Nikki Hall, “and a real European edge. If I’m ordering from a new Sydney designer, I’ll order for one season. In Melbourne there’s more intent.”

Sydney boasts an embarrassment of riches in terms of sights and outdoor attractions. But shopping is higher on the list of must-do Melbourne experiences. It’s at No.3 on the activity list, behind eating out and visiting friends and rellies, according to surveys spanning the last five years. With 37 percent hitting the shops, retail therapy rated way above such vaunted Melbourne attractions as sporting events (10 percent), the casino (9 percent), performing arts (5 percent) and parks and gardens (4 percent).

Melbourne’s grey weather plays right into retail cash registers. As with other shopping capitals like New York, London, Paris, Milan, Toronto and Tokyo, crappy weather equals great retail therapy. The lure of the shops partly explains why the spread of visitors to Melbourne is even throughout the year, with slightly more coming in autumn and winter than in summer and spring.

Nor is Melbourne about to concede its mantle without a fight. The Victorian capital needed to hit back, after the demise of Georges and Daimaru and the Olympic euphoria-fuelled growth spurt of Sydney, and it has. Revitalised city laneways are buzzing with caffeine highs and creativity from new-name designers. The renovated GPO, home to over 60 high-end stores and a champagne bar and billed as the ultimate in “unrivalled sophistication”, opened last September; the vast Melbourne Central (former home of the departed Daimaru) is still being filled (250 stores and counting) and QV’s 21st Century laneways, popular with younger fashionistas, are three new big guns in the CBD alone.

Shopping tours of the laneways make you feel like you’re in the back streets of Venice or Rome. Sydney’s assets are often brazenly displayed, but Melbourne’s gems are often hidden, and the sense of discovery adds to the experience. Head down a flight of stairs in a nondescript laneway and you might stumble into a fashionista’s wonderland, like Christine Barro’s necessary accessories, in a Flinders Lane basement. Barro’s store, simply named Christine, is one of the stops featured in shopping tours and the Shopping Secrets deck of cards (great value for $9.95, or see www.shoppingsecrets.com).

While Sydney and its harbour face out to the world, Melbourne is a city with a world of styles. Only a few kilometres separate South Yarra’s Chapel St and Fitzroy’s Brunswick St, but their aesthetic is so far apart they could be in different cities, if not hemispheres. Ask Nikki Hall how many of her customers come from north of the Murray and she’ll tell you hardly any come from north of the Yarra.

It’s this diversity and richness of experience that visitors love about shopping in Melbourne. Like the European style it trumpets, Melbourne’s shopping experience is about selection, discrimination, quality, specialisation and underplaying. It’s not all about the outfit, but how seamlessly it’s put together. Sydney may be bigger, but less is more in Melbourne.