I finally managed to get inside the new H&M store in Tokyo’s famous, upmarket shopping district of Ginza. It was a weekday evening, so I was confident I would be able to get in. However, come on a Saturday and you will still queue 150 metres down the street. No exaggeration.
Despite the fact that there was no queue, the shop was packed. The first thing to strike me was the floor plan near the elevator. Three floors of women’s clothes, with only the basement dedicated to men. I was on the ground floor (which is known as the 1st floor in Japan), and had already seen the women’s clothes on display when I came in, and I was already thinking that it was, as I feared, going to be very different from H&M in the UK. I already expected this to be the case based on my shopping experiences in H&M stores in Barcelona and Lille, both of which were quite different from each other. I went down to the basement level and looked through the racks for a bit, but nothing really jumped out at me. H&M in the UK is definitely more adventurous than it’s Japanese counterpart. In Japan, H&M is more like Gap. No bright colours, no design prints, and a muted palette. Most of the stuff is either black or grey, and verges on smart-casual. Last time I was in the UK H&M stores, it was more like a cyberpunk 80’s revival. The two couldn’t have been more different. Zannen.