From Balenciaga To Botox: A First Look Inside Flannels’s New Liverpool Flagship

Fancy some Botox with your Balenciaga? A Barry’s Bootcamp training session with your Stone Island? Perhaps a wind machine to help you put the latest ghds to the test, as you contemplate a masterfully mixed martini? If an all encompassing experience is what you’re after – a luxury retail ride that takes in everything from fine food to fillers, streetwear drops to sweaty workouts – you’ll find it in the new, 120,000 square foot, seven-storey world of Flannels Liverpool.

“We’re taking traditional retail to the next level. It’s not just about product,” managing director of luxury David Epstein says of the 46-year-old retailer’s most ambitious, immersive and conceptual project to date. It’s the most recent addition to its portfolio of 56 stores, joining outposts in London, Leicester, Doncaster and Manchester. Flannels’s new home is in the beating heart of Liverpool’s city centre, a cavernous space that was once home to Merseyside’s first department store 80 years ago. Billed as being about much more than shopping, it looks set to boost the city’s retail and cultural capital.

Epstein’s aim is to entice Flannels’s digital shoppers – who grew accustomed to the ease of the e-commerce experience during Covid lockdowns – back into a physical store. The Liverpool flagship incorporates an ambitious expansion of the retailer’s beauty offering (the Flannels Beauty category launched back in 2021), with monthly takeovers promised from rarely-seen-in-department-stores-labels, including Hermès Beauty, Dior Maison and Kylie Cosmetics. Fancy a glass of bubbly as you preen in Pat McGrath Labs’s latest products? Then visit Flannels’s Beauty Bar Changing Room, which boasts a call button for cocktails, a virtual mirror and a red carpet-ready wind machine.

Upstairs, Flannels Liverpool houses an impressive range of men’s and women’s luxury and contemporary labels, from Burberry to Billionaire Boys Club, Gucci to Ganni, Prada to Pucci. The store also features Flannels’s most expansive curation of costume jewellery to date, a made-to-measure tailoring service, a streetwear-dedicated pop-up from hype retailer 18 Montrose, a junior section (think Juicy Couture baby grows and tiny Moon Boots), plus, a VIP space-meets-click and collect corner, where customers can browse standout pieces as they pick up products they’ve bought online.

Bolstering Flannels’s experiential ambitions, the Liverpool store is also home to a roster of restaurants, from the ground floor Italian trattoria Bacinos, to more soon-to-open spots on the sixth-floor roof terrace. For fans of fashion and ab-crunching alike, the space also features an outpost of Barry’s Boot Camp – the first of its kind in a store – and a tweakments space with a champagne recovery room, courtesy of celebrity-approved cosmetic doctor Dr Esho. Forgot your gym gear? No fear, there’s a floor dedicated to workout gear, too. “You can start your day at Barry’s Boot Camp, then grab lunch,” Epstein says.

Experimentation is integral to Flannels’s ambitious retail approach. Defying a homogenous design approach, the store mixes up the topography of its locations. While Flannels Liverpool is situated slap bang in the city centre, its Leicester flagship sits outside the city in Fosse Park shopping centre. There are plans to open more spaces across the country in the upcoming months, from Cardiff to Leeds. Whatever the location, the immersive aim of Flannels is paramount. The message it hopes to get across? “You can literally spend the whole day here.”