Monsoon clothes flagship interiors

Womenswear retailer Monsoon opens a 483m2 Oxford Street flagship store in London today, designed by Project Orange and Glazer, ahead of a potential repositioning of the brand.

Project Orange has created interiors that are ‘New York loft living’ in style, while Glazer has designed all the in-store graphics, including visuals for changing rooms.

According to Glazer creative director Sonja Frick, further identity work could be in the offing as Monsoon moves to address ‘the bigger picture’.

‘Hopefully, we’ll look at the whole brand soon,’ she says. Although the brief would probably stop short of changes to the logo, it would be about ‘pulling the whole brand together’, Frick says.

The flagship store’s interiors hint at the possible forward momentum. ‘It’s an evolution of the brand,’ says Monsoon marketing manager Lucy Bernstein. ‘Once upon a time, we were an intimate boutique, but now everyone works with larger stores. The brief was about how to translate [a more intimate style] to a larger scale.’

Project Orange director James Soane says, ‘It is more urban at one level, but the boutiquey feel has been amplified. There’s a feeling that Monsoon store formats had become quite generic and this is about creating a more playful personality for the interiors.’

There are 14 changing rooms in all, which are ‘like little hotel suites’, says Soane, with lilac, purple and pink colourways to make them ‘more quirky’ and feminine than the typically ‘banal’, high street fitting room experience.