China’s luxury retail resets its footprint — landmark stores take center stage

Luxury brands are increasingly rethinking their reliance on high-end malls, selectively withdrawing from core retail districts as they recalibrate their offline strategies. In Shanghai, a number of leading luxury brands have shuttered stores in prime shopping malls since last year. In January 2025, Moncler closed its boutique at Réel Department Store in the Jing’an Temple area; a month later, Gucci followed, exiting a flagship-positioned space in the same mall. Around the same time, Balenciaga and Saint Laurent also withdrew from the property. Similar adjustments have unfolded in the Xujiahui district. Over the past year, Louis Vuitton, Valentino, Tiffany & Co., and Alexander McQueen have all shuttered their ground-floor boutiques at Shanghai’s One ITC, underscoring this broader shift. Fewer stores, deeper experiences Two structural changes drive this shift. First, the density of high-end malls in Shanghai’s core districts has continued to rise, leaving brands clustered into increasingly overlapping footprints and intensifying internal competition. Réel sits alongside Jing’an Kerry Centre and Plaza 66, and One ITC competes directly with Grand Gateway. With the carrying capacity of these districts reaching its limits, brands are trimming their store networks and reallocating resources toward locations with clearer strategic value and longer-term returns. At the same time, luxury’s channel strategy is being recalibrated. The emphasis is moving from scale and coverage toward efficiency, experience, and the quality of the individual store. By refining their physical footprints, brands are delivering more distinctive expressions of identity and higher-calibre customer experiences within fewer spaces. Together, these moves signal that luxury in China has entered a more refined phase of operation — the contours of high-end retail are quietly shifting. Brands are no longer concentrating solely inside malls, but increasingly opting for characterful neighbourhoods, stand-alone buildings, or singular sites that offer something less replicable. In Shanghai, the tree-lined streets of Wukang and Anfu roads have emerged as a test ground for this transition. The street becomes a new brand stage In May 2025, sportswear giant Adidas opened the first global flagship store for its Originals line at the intersection of Anfu and Wukang roads in Shanghai — a top-tier neighbourhood often described as a magnet for youth culture and a street-style epicenter. The store occupies the former site of The Beast’s flagship, housed in a building that once served as the Yongle Palace cinema, a venue steeped in the city's cultural memory. The Originals flagship draws on the building’s history and architectural character, weaving the brand’s “classic, moving forward” ethos into the fabric of the neighbourhood. Design details nod to old Shanghai: display fixtures reference the geometry of traditional louvred windows, while terrazzo floors recall the textures of domestic interiors from another era, inviting shoppers to encounter the city's memory alongside the product. In August 2025, Salomon followed suit in the same area, reworking a century-old French-style residence into a white-clad concept store known as “Fujun” (福郡). Inspired by the brand’s outdoor-forward boutique in Paris’ Marais district, the space brings a thread of French street culture to Anfu Road. Inside, a curatorial approach anchors the experience, blending retrospectives of past collaborations, art installations, cross-disciplinary projects, curated fashion selections, and local community programming into an experimental retail format that blurs shopping and cultural immersion. In October 2025, Longchamp unveiled its concept store, La Maison de Famille Longchamp, on Wukang Road, embarking on a new chapter for the brand within a historic free-standing villa. In January, Louis Vuitton marked the 130th anniversary of its Monogram with a temporary project in the same neighbourhood, transforming another old residence into the Louis Vuitton Hotel. Moving room by room, the brand staged a series of thematic displays tracing the evolution of its most emblematic bags — Speedy, Keepall, Noé, Alma, and Neverfull — and, through them, the enduring creative life of the Monogram itself. Taken together, these examples point to a broader shift. Brands are no longer content with simply occupying space; they are positioning themselves as participants in the life and narrative of the neighbourhood. By drawing on architectural memory and the rhythms of everyday street life, retail is recast as an immersive, emotionally resonant environment. At its core lies a more rethinking of commerce: retail as a means of forging human connection rather than completing a single transaction. Through storytelling and curatorial intent, these spaces attempt to restore a sense of warmth and continuity to brand-consumer relationships. The result is a deeper dialogue with lifestyle-driven, high-net-worth, and younger audiences, and a more durable form of emotional alignment. Such spaces function as social currency in their own right, prompting organic sharing and reinterpretation across digital and physical communities, allowing brand narratives to extend, evolve, and endure. Non-standard architecture as a new footfall engine A similar logic is playing out in Beijing, though in a different form. In recent months, Tiffany, Dior, and Louis Vuitton have each unveiled stand-alone flagship stores in Sanlitun. Designed by some of the world's most prominent architects, the three buildings together form a highly legible architectural presence for the LVMH group — an assertion of brand power inscribed directly into the cityscape. Tiffany’s flagship, designed by MVRDV, features a fin-like glass facade that animates light and shadow across its surface. Dior, envisioned by Christian de Portzamparc, takes shape as a sculptural form reminiscent of a couture dress suspended in mid-air. Louis Vuitton, meanwhile, enlisted Jun Aoki to design its space, weaving Beijing’s urban context into a contemporary architectural language that echoes the house’s enduring spirit of travel. These buildings have moved well beyond the definition of retail. Through highly expressive architectural language, they embed brand heritage, artistic ambition, and contemporary aesthetics directly into the urban fabric, becoming concentrated displays of corporate power and aesthetic intent. This is not simply an upgrade in store format but the installation of non-replicable cultural landmarks in the heart of the city. In contrast to the Shanghai approach of embedding into the rhythms of everyday neighbourhood life, Beijing’s flagship openings place greater emphasis on constructing a powerful cultural and artistic field. Here, sculptural, visually commanding architecture asserts landmark status at the urban scale, while interiors rely on curatorial narratives and immersive art programs to communicate brand values and creative vision. Despite their different expressions — Shanghai’s neighbourhood integration versus Beijing’s architectural monumentality — these projects signal the same fundamental shift. Luxury brands are moving beyond conventional retail, investing in urban spaces capable of carrying cultural weight and sustaining deeper engagement. The old playbook of standardize, scale, and expand has given way to a more selective strategy where distinctive architecture and experiential programming hold consumer attention longer, creating richer experiences and stronger brand connections. Sales alone no longer measure success. What matters is whether a brand can anchor itself within the city, cultivating an irreplaceable presence that functions as both cultural destination and brand reservoir. Whether embedded in neighbourhood streets or expressed through bold architectural landmarks, these spaces reshape the relationship between brand and city — ensuring luxury is not just purchased, but seen, discussed, and remembered.

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China’s luxury retail resets its footprint — landmark stores take center stage