GO SHOPPING: On a whirlwind tour of Las Vegas, ROSEMARY MAC CABEtries her luck at the biggest gamble of all, outlet shopping, while BERNICE HARRISONchecks out the value in retail villages near Paris and Barcelona
IT OCCURS to me several times on my two-day whirlwind trip to Las Vegas, that I may be the only tourist who has brought jeans. At the airport, for example, everyone’s dressed in linen “pants”, as the Americans would say; in the hotel, residents mill around in summer dresses and cut-offs, bikinis and trunks; in shopping malls, families carrying Banana Republic and Juicy Couture bags wear matching cotton separates.
It’s only when I go outside that I realise why I’m the only jeans-wearer in the village: Vegas is roasting. The temperature is a “mild 42 degrees”, as one resident puts it. Then again,it doesn’t matter because I’m here to shop, and I have a world of choice at my fingertips. Or at the end of a transaction involving my fingertips, a credit card and a biro.
The first thing that strikes you when you touch down is that there are slot machines in the airport, beforeyou collect your baggage. But gambling ain't what I'm here for, so I head straight for the Tropicana hotel to check in and get some kip after my 14-hour journey.
The hotel is almost at the end of the strip, between the MGM Grand and the Mandalay Bay and, when I get to my room after a satisfyingly speedy check-in, I spend about 10 minutes at the window gazing at the lights.
It’s kind of surreal, looking at neon signs that seem so familiar from their omnipresence on TV and in film, and yet are entirely new. And it’s hugely overwhelming: a tourist’s Vegas may be just one street, but man, is it a long one.
When I wake the next morning, bright and breezy thanks to air conditioning and blinds, I realise that my favourite thing, possibly in the world, is room service breakfast (French toast with cinnamon and maple syrup? Don’t mind if I do), and that my second favourite is the smell of vanilla, which the Tropicana has somehow had piped through its air-con system so that everything smells, well, tropical.
I head to my first destination, Las Vegas Premium Outlets North, at 10am, thinking I’ll beat the crowds. Not so: the place is teeming with enthusiastic shoppers – and on a Sunday!
You wouldn’t see the likes of it on O’Connell Street, I tell the bemused man on the information desk, who kits me out with a map, a discount book (for $5, which I redeem within about 10 seconds in Sunglass Hut), and sells me tickets to two shows for the evenings I’m in the city.
Then I’m ushered out to try my luck at the biggest gamble of all: outlet shopping.
Las Vegas Premium Outlets has two main malls: South and North, which are, well, you see where I’m going. The South outlet is very family-focused, with a lot of sports stores (Reebok, Adidas and Under Armour, for the rugby-lovers) and family-friendly food courts.
The North outlet is where I do most of my damage in stores including, but not limited to, Banana Republic (a bit like Zara, but more upmarket), Coach (leather goods, well worth an investment as the leather is buttery soft and ages beautifully), 7 For All Mankind jeans, Michael Kors, Gap and Steve Madden shoes, as well as . . . well, the list is (almost) endless.
My itinerary says six hours at the North outlet on day one, which I initially think is too long. What will I do? Who will I talk to? As it turns out, I’ll shop – and I’ll talk to the nice man at Starbucks who thinks my name is José (I tell them Rose in Starbucks; it’s easier to write on a cup than Rosemary). When I’m tired of shopping, I’ll go to the all-you-can-eat sushi buffet in Makino, which is, in a word, amazing, and then I’ll resume shopping until my little feet are red raw and it’s time to go back to the Trop for some exploring.
If you don’t want to gamble in Vegas – which is what most people go to Vegas for – believe me, there’s a whole lot else to do, starting with shopping, and ending with dinner and a show.
I headed to the miracle mile shops at Planet Hollywood where I ate the best fajita of my life in La Salsa Cantina and then took in Vegas: The Show, which made me determined to become a dancer, listen to more Elvis and never to eat Mexican food again. The next day I headed to the South outlet for a shorter visit, stocking up on Ugg boots ($180 to our €250 – you do the math), hair products and a Tom Ford eau du parfum for a bargainous $56 before heading back to the strip and riding the Monorail down to Farrah's and Caesar's Palace Forum Shops, an enormous mall that houses every store you could ever think of under one roof, painted with, of course, a fake sky.
Then I walked up the strip and home to the Tropicana, past a fake lake and a fake Eiffel tower, two fake Latino Elvises and a fake Marilyn Monroe; through a mall with a fake sky and a fake rainstorm and home, where I can see, on the horizon, a fake sphinx and a fake pyramid.
Then I go up to my room, through vanilla-scented hallways, past slot machines and craps tables and a Starbucks, and go to sleep in a balmy 25 degrees, dreaming of real rain and streets without crowds and wearing my jeans again. But, you know, my new ones that I got in the outlet.
ROSEMARY MAC CABEwas a guest of Las Vegas Premium Outlets and stayed there courtesy of the Tropicana Hotel and Casino
Las Vegas
Shop: Las Vegas Premium Outlets are at two locations – North at 875 South Grand Central Parkway, and South at 7400 Las Vegas Boulevard South. See premiumoutlets.com for details.
Fly: Aer Lingus flies direct from Dublin to Las Vegas from €639 return. US Airways flies via Philadaelphia or Charlotte, North Carolina from €612 round trip.
Stay:
The Tropicana comes highly recommended for its French toast and vanilla-scented air conditioning. Rooms from $55 if you avail of online special offers. See troplv.com. For the traditional Vegas experience, try the MGM Grand, mgmgrand.com – keep an eye out for the lion enclosure – or Caesar’s Palace, caesarspalace.com. Anywhere on the strip will be within (slow, crowded) walking distance of everything else, so don’t worry too much about which hotel you choose
Shop til you drop - Paris and Barcelona
AT THE HEIGHT of the boom I interviewed some shoppers for one of many articles about Irish people going on shopping trips to New York. One trio of women had just returned from a weekend there, but before a niggle of envy could creep into my head about their Sex in the Citylifestyle it transpired they had spent the entire time in Woodbury Common, the vast discount shopping mall in New Jersey.
They went back into the city only to sleep in a hotel picked because it was close to Port Authority, where the bus to Woodbury leaves from. Loaded down with specially-bought suitcases – they went empty handed – they were thrilled with their bargain buys and the fact that they had seen hardly anything that Manhattan has to offer didn’t bother them in the least.
The two sisters from Dublin I met in La Vallée, the outlet village on the outskirts of Paris, two weekends ago were having a quite different experience and one that’s probably more in tune with how designer outlets are developing in Europe.
Their family three-day trip to Paris included a day in the city taking in some of the tourist sights and two days in Disneyland Paris. They’d left the kids there with their husbands for the morning and nipped over to La Vallée Village which is nearby – there was a complimentary bus – for a browse around some of the 90-plus shops.
Several purchases later “teenage stuff in Diesel, a blouse each in Max Mara, cups in Bodum and pair of shoes in Tod’s” – they had had their Paris retail fix and were ready to head back to the theme park.
Yes, they’d been to Kildare Village they said – it’s part of the same Value Retail group as La Vallée and looks quite similar – but this wasn’t the same and “anyway we’re on holidays”, they said happily.
European designer outlets are different particularly from American ones in several ways, mostly due to stricter regulation. Brands are not allowed to produce “special” outlet-only ranges – they must sell from their main ranges and prices must be at a minimum of 33 per cent discount – though it’s usually more and only last season’s ranges can be sold. Also, some outlets, particularly the Value Retail villages, try to replicate the high street experience. La Vallée and La Roca, the outlet in Barcelona which I also visited this month are like toy towns – paved, spotlessly clean streets lined with instantly recognisable branded shops.
When you buy something, you don’t get some generic cheapo bag, you get the branded one. There’s no rummaging through racks of jumbled up brands of clothes or stepping over piles of stuff on the floor in search of the bargain-to-endall-bargains as there is in giant warehouse-type discounters.
The company operates the nine European villages, each one on the outskirts of a main city, and likes to think that while each is pretty much similar in layout they reflect the city or country they’re in. And so it was in La Vallée, where even on a rainy Saturday the place was thronged with grim-faced, determined looking shoppers with a lot of the same attitude you’d find in Paris.
It was elbows out at the Armani outlet where at any time a hand was liable to appear over your shoulder to pluck something from the rail you were flicking through just as you got your mitt on it, and short of setting yourself on fire it was difficult to figure out quite how you’d get the attention of the assistants in some of the shops.
And there were queues at the tills in many of the shops which, as Parisians are famously savvy shoppers, is a good sign.
The trade-off was the brands and the prices. A friend in Paris for fashion week last year reported a mass exodus of the fashion pack to La Vallée and not just because of their famed reluctance to buy anything at full retail price.
It’s the super smart labels on offer. Valentino, Jimmy Choo, Givenchy, Joseph, Missoni, Celine and Marni are just some of the big names with small boutiques in La Vallée – all had further discounts than the expected 33 per cent.
Versace, less blingtastic than I remember, was calm and quiet and, as with the other brands, you’d only know you were in a discount shop when you looked at the marked-down price tag.
Hip French label Maje – newly arrived in BT2 – is there and I by-passed Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren and the rest of the US brands and headed for my own favourite French label, Marithé et François Girbaud, which (for me) is at the upper reaches of affordable. A pin-striped, asymmetrical pinafore dress from last season – though it could be from any of their seasons – was marked down from €240 €70. That’s the sort of reduction that makes sense of outlet shopping.
On to Barcelona and to La Roca where the outlet village was distinctly Spanish in atmosphere. Like the one in Paris, it’s less than an hour outside the city, accessible by a coach or car.
There was a beautiful, mosaic-tiled fountain in the middle of one “street”, a children’s playground in a corner, shaded from the scorching sun by leafy trees, and plenty of places to eat. (Weirdly, in the Paris village there is only Starbucks.)
Half of the visitors to La Roca are tourists. There are several buses a day from the centre of Barcelona and the Costa Brava and on the day I visited there seemed to be a lot of Russians doing some serious shopping.
It’s slightly bigger than Paris with more than 100 shops, much friendlier and more laid back and with a good sprinkling of Spanish shops alongside the big name international brands. I stuck to super-cool Spanish brands we either don’t have at all or ones that are expensive here.
So it was Camper, Hoss Intropia, Desigual, Armand Basi, Bimba Lola, and Adolfo Dominguez, where it’s hard not to want to buy everything in sight (though I restricted myself to a white shirt, half price at €70). At the Loewe shop – the classic Spanish leather brand – they were giving out glasses of champagne, which made it feel as though it was smack bang in the middle of Passeig de Gràcia in the centre of Barcelona.
There were homewares too in both outlets, but given the weight allowances the thought of lugging home the amazing Antonio Miro bedlinen in Homestudio or the really well- priced cast-iron saucepan in Le Creuset was too much. Another time.
BERNICE HARRISONtravelled as a guest of Value Retail, kildarevillage.com
Paris and Barcelona
La Vallée:
Open 10am-8pm, though there are longer opening hours during the summer, so check the website.
Daily coach departures from Place des Pyramides in central Paris to La Vallée Village. Or by Rer train (line A4) to Val d’Europe/Serris Montévrain station, then walk 10 minutes or take the shuttle to La Vallée Village. Full details on Lavaleevillage.com
La Roca Village, Barcelona: Open Monday - Saturday, from 10am to 9pm. Closed on Sundays and bank holidays
Bus from Plaça Catalunya, 3 times a day from Monday to Saturday. Buy tickets at the Barcelona Tourist Information Office in Plaça Catalunya; or on the coach. Regular coach service from the Costa Brava. Full details at La RocaVillage.com
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