How Armadale stole Chapel Street’s fashion crown

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Key points

• The number of vacant shops on Chapel Street sits between 50 and 60, according to the Chapel Street Traders Association, an improvement on 2020 when almost 100 shops were empty. 
• But in nearby Armadale, shops on High Street are proving difficult to secure as the retail strip thrives. 

Empty shops and for-lease signs line Chapel Street, once Melbourne’s premier fashion shopping strip.

There are about 50 to 60 vacant shops, according to the Chapel Street Traders Association. While that is an improvement on 2020, when almost 100 shops were closed, the echoes of the pandemic – lockdowns and the rise of online shopping – remain obvious.

Ilana Moses opened her store, Grace, on High Street Armadale last year, attracted by the number of fashion stores in the precinct. Credit: Simon Schluter

But in nearby High Street, Armadale, every store is full.

Fashion retailers on High Street include Scanlan Theodore, Cos, Zimmermann, Viktoria & Woods, Bassike, Nimble and Camilla.

Ilana Moses relocated her designer clothing store, Grace, from Toorak last year to Armadale without even considering Chapel Street as a location.

“High Street had this sort of magnetism because it has just changed so much over the previous five years,” she said. “It’s had its different iterations in the past: it was quite bridal for such a long time, and it has had this curated resurgence, with beautiful stores all doing their own thing.”

Shoppers in High Street, Armadale, where retailers scramble to open a store. Credit: Simon Schluter

Moses said part of High Street’s appeal lay in the length of the strip, which is short and contained compared with Chapel Street, where the length makes it hard to get a critical mass of certain types of stores.

“For those of us who are old enough to remember shopping in Chapel Street, it’s sad,” she said. “It was such a beautiful, interesting, eclectic street; it really had something special going on.”

Matt Lanigan, president of the Chapel Street Traders Association, said that while there were some vacancies, new businesses had come onto the street in the past year.

“[The vacant shopfronts] are just a sign that some landlords aren’t up with the current trends and costs associated with running a business in 2023 and haven’t dropped their rent or come to the table with some incentives to get people in there,” he said. “It’s a bit of an old school mentality, really, where they think dropping the rent is going to drop the value of their property, which isn’t the case.”

Danielle Pelly, co-founder of fashion brand Ena Pelly, is preparing to open a store on High Street in July. She said her main difficulty was securing real estate on the hotly contested strip.

“High Street, Armadale is the most premium retail strip in Victoria, probably in Australia,” she said. “It has a beautiful exclusive feel about it at the moment.”

Pelly said not everyone wanted to shop at big shopping centres, such as Chadstone, and people wanted to experience strip shopping with a mix of retail stores and cafes.

“We didn’t consider Chapel Street at all,” she said.

Pelly said she went to school near Chapel Street and remembered every single shop being full, but in recent years, “there has been a definite move away from the area”.

Peter Frankel, president of the High Street Armadale Business Association, said there were no vacancies on High Street.

“It is fully let. People are trying to get in here,” he said. “There are a lot of younger designers who have opened up. It is very much a destination.”

The City of Stonnington’s latest figures for High Street show the vacancy rate at 5.95 per cent compared with the Chapel Street precinct, which includes surrounding streets such as Greville Street, Prahran, at 9.7 per cent. Stonnington does not have vacancy figures for Chapel Street itself.

Empty shops on Chapel Street on Friday. Credit: Simon Schluter

The precinct also has to cope with construction work on the Metro Tunnel and the redevelopment of the shopping and entertainment centre the Jam Factory.

Caroline Ralphsmith, chief executive of the Melbourne Fashion Festival, said Chapel Street was struggling to find its niche, whereas High Street had thrived by offering a good range of everything, from street wear to party wear.

“It’s time for a resurgence, and I wish it was happening faster,” she said. “There are so many apartments going up in [the Chapel Street] area, it feels like there should be a logical suite of foot traffic going their way, but I am not seeing that at the moment … it is a little bit of a no-man’s land.”

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