Fashion
King’s Road, Chelsea has long been an area synonymous with style: from the mid 50’s with the opening of the Mary Quant Bazaar boutique (see Uniquely Chelsea), King’s Road defined what it was to do the Saturday shopping ‘parade’(stroll); a destination area, which embodied community, and respected tradition, whilst celebrating the avant-garde. That ethos has remained as Chelsea has been both witness to and instrumental in changing fashion zeitgeists over the decades. From the Swinging Sixties with famed British designers and Chelsea shop owners, including Ossie Clark, Celia Birtwell, Biba and Quorum, as well as luminaries like Molly Parkin. The ‘high priestess of punk,’ Vivienne Westwood emerged in the postmodern 70’s landscape, opening Let It Rock, in World’s End, later renamed as Sex, Seditionaries, and then Vivienne Westwood (as it still stands today with the clock). Westwood continued to evolve in the 80’s mainly by re-referencing and parodying the Sixties and previous fashion eras, whilst Chelsea was once again part of another fashion revolution, as New romantics emerged, as well as indoor ‘markets’ like 'The Great Gear Market,’ opened, where all the modern young things wanted to work. The mini shopping emporium, The Chelsea Drugstore, was open to the late 80’s. As the rebellion phased out, in came the opulence and 80’s power look from bold shoulders, women’s suits to couture-like evening wear, as Catherine Walker’s Sydney Street shop became a destination. Through the nineties and to today, fashions continue to pervade the King’s Road, an area that still counts independent boutiques from over 40 years ago as part of the community, as well as celebrating high street labels, new female founded business’, jewellers, lifestyle concept stores, rental and designers from across the globe.
King’s Road has also become a favourite destination for pop up stores - please contact us via social media or email for dates.
Come and discover for yourself - there’s something for everyone.
Fashion + Lingerie + Accessories
Boden
COS
Fashion/jewellery Rental:
Felt Jewellery
Hurr
Repair&Restoration:
The Handbag Clinic: - See interview with founder, Charlotte Staerck under Female Founder section: Launched in Chelsea in 2015, The Handbag Clinic is the leading UK fashion accessories restoration brand and is the first to also now include pre-loved luxury resale.
Which Luxury Brands are accepted.
The process.
We welcome all luxury brands but I would say our most popular brands include Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Mulberry. In addition to handbags, we also clean, repair and restore shoes, leather clothing – particularly jackets - and fashion accessories such as wallets and belts.
From changing the colour of the shoe, to restoring a chewed, scuffed or torn leather heel or replacing hardware and broken straps. I would say our most popular treatment request for shoes is the restoration of the signature red sole on Christian Louboutin shoes. Whilst luxury items tend to be the most popular given their high price-point, we also restore many non-designer vintage handbags which are deemed just as valuable as family heirlooms for instance.
Because we restore over 700 bags each month and have been restoring designer handbags for over nine years, we have created brand specific restorations, which include the little extras to combat areas of concern we frequently see from those brands. For example, the replating of 24 carat gold on a CC lock or hand-dyeing the rope finish for a Balenciaga City.
Materials.
The main types of leather you will see on a handbag are pigmented, aniline (absorbent), exotic and then you have suede and nubuck. The easiest leather to clean and protect at home is pigmented leather. Absorbent leathers need a little extra care - if they are not cleaned and protected correctly, you could actually cause accidental staining. You can spot the difference between these leathers by taking a very small amount of liquid and placing it on an unseen area inside the bag. An absorbent leather will darken immediately as the liquid is absorbed.
Leather is the easiest material to protect at home and our care kits include full instructions if customers want to treat their handbag at home. Alternatively, we offer a professional cleaning service ensuring the best possible treatment for different leathers. This is priced at £74.95.
For suede and nubuck we recommend the first protection treatment is carried out professionally to ensure each of the fibres are fully protected. You can then keep on top of this at home but we would recommend checking into the clinic for a clean and protect treatment once a year to keep it looking its best (£74.95).
Treatments.
The most popular treatment is a full restoration at £255, which includes a clean on the exterior and interior, removal of all areas of wear/scuff/staining from the exterior, any minor stitch repairs and a carefully crafted protection treatment to nourish and protect the leather.
Restoration treatments can perform miracles adding hundreds and even thousands of pounds onto the value of leather handbags or shoes, you may have otherwise discarded. At its most basic, cleaning removes stubborn stains and dye transfers from even the most delicate and exotic leathers.
Repair services delve deeper taking care of scuffs, scratches, rips and tears as well as colour loss, broken zips, worn edges and split piping.
In the case of vintage handbags, restorative work is not necessarily the process of making something look brand new again, but instead, using our specialist techniques conservatively to restore and retain that vintage feel – giving the bag a new lease of life whilst maintaining all the branding and the all-important vintage aesthetic.
Authentication.
We now have a full team of Buyers who are fully trained in authentication. Any one bag will be checked by at least three different sets of eyes before being placed online and instore. Whilst we have complete faith in each Buyer, it’s super important to have a robust process so that nothing gets missed.
This dedication to authenticity is why customers choose Handbag Clinic to authenticate items they have purchased via other reselling platforms. It’s why we are trusted by auction houses to authenticate their full catalogue before the big day and our resale operation has been so successful. We pride ourselves on our authenticity skills and if anyone has a single reservation on a bag the item will be escalated to a more Senior Buyer and so on until it reaches myself. We have seen some “super fakes” as we call them but luckily, they haven’t made it through our robust checks.
In line with increasing demand for our authentication services, we launched ‘Authenticate’ as an official service. We provide detailed authentication reports for all brands we stock; from full reports with finite detail and photographic evidence, to a signed certificate or simple evaluation as to whether the bag is real or a replica. Customers find this invaluable when considering a purchase from a third-party seller – they send us the link and we can authenticate it before they commit to buying.