Inside the The Corner Shop, The Strand

Awoken from Sydney’s slumber, the gargantuan Westfield Shopping complex redevelopment amasses itself overlooking Pitt Street Mall, the major crossroad that intersects many of the city’s major retail outlets and two of its biggest department stores. At the cost of $1.2 billion Australian dollars, its cavernous catacombs dwarfs all surrounding buildings including the Victorian arcade The Strand standing tall since 1891.

But this is where the strokes of creativity happen. As known for housing some of Australia’s leading fashion designers, shoemakers and dress tailors, it is also home to an inconspicuously looking store aptly called The Corner Shop. The establishment of a young, eclectic fashion store in 2006 by the patronage of Australian businesswoman Belinda Seper envisioned a new voice to a younger Australian generation of women. From her daughter Sophie’s birth in 1991, she proposed The Corner Shop concept that would allow this demographic of young ingénues to be exposed to a new existence and curiosity for clothes with a cultural affluence in mind. At the whisper of Belinda Seper’s name on local shores, the fashion industry swiftly acknowledged her prowess and willpower. Quintessentially the person to pioneer her own eponymous fashion business in 1992 bringing international labels such as Marni and Prada to our shores, with them she brought modernity to Australian fashion giving way to local women to have an equal international knell. Seper, formally in the Army Reserve, a modeling veteran and a personal shopper for Grace Bros (now Myer department store), realised her second project – The Corner Shop opened first on William Street in Sydney’s East and in 2006, its current residence in The Strand Arcade.

With a high-powering Australian-European boutique, Belinda which housed such entities like Lanvin, Prada and Ann Demeulemeester, it was easily to feel intimidated in an esoteric space. Whilst the store frontage may seem so, walking in that description dissipates. So does it when strolling into The Corner Shop store. People were introduced to the notion of fashion being created rather than manufactured. The Corner Shop vocally sounded a creative language that would unravel to uncover uncompromised design, quality and workmanship. From 2000 onwards, local startups such as LOVER by Susien Chong and Nic Briand transpired a brand concept that felt genuine and intimate amongst the trove of young ingénues, there felt a sense of belonging and a mode of nascent maturity.

Curiously, generation-y would listen and remember a repository of melodies and vocals of old bands, singers like Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith and others from what their parents’ era. And those that discover The Corner Shop gain an understanding of how music and clothing have perfect synergy and how the intertwining of the two would be important in their own working life. The store does not force but gesture how intrinsic clothing is a part of everyday.

Picture this: you enter a Mise-en-scène with an effervescent ambience. Unfurnished wooden floors basked in the open-sill sunlight, acted as foundations for perennial garments that have a sense of belonging. The adjacent cream white walls are besided by wooden pigeonholes, dramatic and thematic in their own way. They have been lined with variegated paraphernalia: cream embossed Belinda envelopes, torn paperback pages as a repository of memory and old literature. It doesn’t come too difficult once finding out that the store’s interior designer Kelvin Ho created the space when it first opened. Reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, when Seper had approached Ho to design the space on the whim of a magazine editorial spread, the intriguing cross-pollinating space would take shape. It was a collaborative freshness of two minds, a shipwright and business entrepreneur, creating a mosaic concept that of which allowed the store’s staff to easily evolve and change the standing objects, books, defunct periodicals in a every-changing cohesive whole. Ho set out to design a store that was never to be congruent where everything never exactly held in close proximity.

”I wanted my stores to be comfortable emotionally”, explained Belinda in an archived interview with The Sydney Morning Herald back in 2002. Such an idiosyncratic perspective that proves her stores weren’t just designed to make the visual merchandise sit pretty. Her ability to link a conceptualised space with a seminal ambience would make anybody visiting her stores feel at great ease. Just like a grassroots fitting room in the back of the The Corner Shop with curtains on each side for women to grab a special silk piece by Vanessa Bruno or Josh Goot to change into, with overhead are nude light bulb fixtures illuminating the overall space like on a mid-summer’s night.

The Corner Shop’s curtained dressing room

Observing the store’s interior chasms, an assorted assemblage of paper and stage marquettes, where there are such devices including a turntable, open spreads of a previous Superfine jeans photoshoot, wooden armchairs to raw energetic spreads from the 1990’s of a worn out i-D magazine and a concertina folded visual of Belgian designer Christian Wijnants’ 2005 pret-a-porter collection, the shopping experience is completely cultural and cross-pollinating. It drives a certain customer to feel, touch, and be inspired by the store’s ethos for which the wooden compartments that surround the u-shaped space act as its inner workings. In June of last year, Ann Demeulemeester’s Spring 2009 collection was projected presenting her delicate rouge/ orange asymmetrical cotton dress. It echoed that wearing fashion was autonomous and democratic. It is idiosyncrasies such as these that make entering the store feel like a creative sanctuary.

It’s hot sunny weather outside in Sydney again, the sales season has just picked up. The store’s all female staff evoke a strong Australian spirit with a tinge of European sensibility. In Sporting waist tapered knee skirts and camisole tees, it’s the vernacular of a modern Australian luxury; these archetypal garments are treasured. From the side of one eye, Phoebe Comino, the store’s manager introduces herself wearing a tank top and jeans ensemble.

Store Manager of The Strand Phoebe Comino (pictured) says she is constantly inspired by brands and the designers behind them

Comino joined the Belinda company two years ago with a background in different creative facets including modeling and visual merchandising. With her dark blonde and statuesque figure, she trembles down the ‘runway’ [unfurnished floorboards] in her studded black boots only to greet her with an affable personality where in one case, she assists a young woman behind the fitting room curtains with undergarment sizing. She converses, “I believe the most important aspects for The Corner Shop would have to be, to keep a tight capsule collection of the newest unknown & sought after labels from local & international designers. The vision & eclectic style of the corner shop is also so important, to showcase these brands in a new light. We value high quality designs, products, service and style.”

This sensory experience transcends further onto the sister boutique BELINDA. The aura of esteemed fashion houses inside echo their signature pret-a-porter, drape and cut and whilst the differentiation between The Corner Shop maybe that the former caters for the more women, their inseparable nature for empowering a strong female identity is lucid.
This high quality of design in products eschews what might be tempted as luxury descriptors. For all the editorial headlines of a ‘return to slow fashion’, this young generation now accustomed to e-commerce is intelligently aware of the commitment and resilience of their talented contemporaries grabbling with the balance of a fashion business and design creativity. When The Corner Shop chose to focused on a British contingency theme that welcomed young British brands such as Christopher Kane, Peter Pilotto, and Erdem, arguably one distinction came to mind stated by Central Saint Martins’ MA Fashion course director Louise Wilson, “The fundamental thing is that students used to work within their individual skills or with what they could afford. I call that youth. Christopher Kane, when he graduated with those amazing lace dresses, bought the lace from Dalston market. It was what he could afford and he still did something amazing with it. When Margiela did his first deconstruction it was not that expensive. It was an idea that he carried out.”

Phoebe explains further that the exposure to these talented young designers not only reflects their generation but also to see first-hand the skills and craft involved in a knitted sweater or silk organza dress. “To learn how garments were constructed, printed or the entire inspiration through to design process is so interesting that we always try to share this information. Why keep it a secret? Once you know it, you love it more! The collaborations and events we organise in store are another fun way to get out of beaten tracks.” Looking at the store’s current stocklist, French labels include Isabel Marant and Vanessa Bruno, 3.1 Phillip Lim and Alexander Wang where the finishing details on each garment are impeccable. British designer’s Richard Nicoll’s dresses and Jade Sarita Arnott’s paneled skirts have been entirely realised using local manufacturing in London and New York respectively.
The Corner Shop has had consistent displays of collaborative installations that aim to nurture the womb of visual creativity. Previously, Australian designer Josh Goot and more recent Dion Lee have had their collections presented in-store and variegated frontages that have celebrated the collated inspirations by local fashion designers in a series of moodboards. Sydney based accessories label Benah created by Brenda Harvey was presented in special fixtures that showed her leather bags and scarves hung on wooden furnishings. In early December, Australian photographer Adrian Mesko approached the store’s buyer Elise Pioch in a brand new label called Temps Des Reves that gave birth to photographic printed silk scarves, each consisting one of Mesko’s travel scenes from Bond Street to the urban sprawl of Havana and fluffy fur jackets in Portobello markets. These collaborations are a result of believing Sydney is uprising in an artistic spiritual synergy.

Undoubtedly, nothing to date would have been possible without the inscrutable tour de force of Belinda Seper who keeps a watchful eye on her youthful business. Phoebe along with her shop staff aim to stay competitive in The Corner Shop’s resilient future. Importantly, Seper has threaded her ethos of design and emotional value of which has elevated the status of garments, the become enriching and rewarding pieces. Like twisting vine foliage, the store’s discovery to find new and innovative designers for retail is simplistic. Rather, it is through gesturing the luxury of enteruprual ideas – from a sketch or toile into a worn product and the painstaking hours to make it happen, The Corner Shop sees fashion equate to intelligence in a beautiful equilibrium.

The Corner Shop – www.thecornershop.com.au
Belinda – www.belinda.com.au