As part of this module, we have to constantly record our inspiration and research in our sketchbooks and on our blogs. We luckily got the opportunity to visit London for the day. As London is my second home, I was looking forward to visiting my favourite places. We arrived in London around 11ish and got dropped off near Marble Arch.
My flatmate and I decided to visit Selfridges first. If you have been reading my blog from the start, you would know that Selfridges is one of my favourite places for inspiration. The clothes are always so beautiful and I always get inspirations from the clothes that I see and always impressed by the visual merchandise. This time, I found two window displays that particularly stood out to me:
Both of the displays are visually pleasing, colourful and fun which is different to many displays that I have seen recently. I was so excited to see the new Self Portrait collection and as usual, it didn't disappoint! We then headed to Oxford Street's Topshop, I always feel so lost in this store because it is way too big. The next stop was Liberty - we looked at all the bespoke fragrances and could not believe the prices of some of them. After browsing Liberty, we walked to Carnaby Street, I love this part of London. Monki is always a shop that I am excited to visit because it normally has some unique items.
Abercrombie and Fitch was next on the list, we wanted to look at the famous fragrance; Fierce. As I used to work here, I already knew the best sellers and new products but it was good to go back and refresh my memory. Just off of Abercrombie and Fitch is Burlington Arcade, we walked through and came across various bespoke fragrance stores. The most useful store we came across was Penhaligon's, the women was very informative and she told us that almost all her clients come in for a personal experience/fragrance. They don't follow specific trends or look for certain scents, they end up buying what they like. She also said that they have released a new scent that celebrates the British tradition of tea drinking but so far this hasn't been the most successful fragrance although it has a good narrative behind it. But it still has a chance to grow as it's very new.
Then we got the tube to Knightsbridge and went to Harrods. This was one of my highlights from the day! Toy Kingdom made me feel like a child again and it brought back so many memories! The fragrance section was unbelievable, there was certain fragrances that were only sold in Harrods. To give our legs a little rest we grabbed a Costa and had a small break. Our next plan was to find magazine store. We headed to various magazine/book stores such as Koeing and The Vintage Magazine Store but there wasn't a big selection of magazine that would be useful for layouts, we didn't find what we were looking for. We walked around Leicster Square and Picadilly, popped into the National Gallery and decided to go to the Vogue 100, A Century of Style exhibition which I will explain in more depth in another blog post.
Covent Garden was the next stop, this was my favourite place when I started going to Central London by myself. We discovered a new stationary shop called Kikki.K. I will also be doing another blog post on this because it is my new favourite shop for stationary and I believe it will be an emerging brand! For lunch we went to Nandos (I am obsessed with the olives!!) and then went to Camden for a browse. Camden was full of quirky people as usual but I would have preferred to visit when the market was open. We had about 40 minutes left until we had to be on the coach so we went back to Marble Arch and looked at the shops until it was time to return back to the coach.
Photo Credit - Chloe Ferdinand
