When the shopping urge strikes, San Francisco is an excellent city to be in. The cosmopolitan spread of merchandise includes gourmet foods, antiques and artwork, whimsical home decor, designer fashions, secondhand thrift, music, and offbeat gifts galore.
LOCAL DESIGN
As the birthplace of blue jeans and behemoth Gap Inc., it is no surprise that San Francisco’s fashion sense is dominated by denim and other casuals. Still, the common ultra-relaxed look is joined by others that up the fashion ante. Hipster haunts in the Mission and Haight neighborhoods are swarmed by frightfully cool twenty- and thirtysomethings in edgy, attitude-laced outfits, while the smart central neighborhoods are strolled by carefully coifed urban sophisticates in preppy and Euro-chic designer outfits.
San Francisco has a strong independent design culture, evidenced not only by the locally made clothing, jewelry, accessories, housewares, and crafts carried by boutiques, but also by the large turnout at design and shopping fairs that are held throughout the year such as Urban Air Market (www.urbanairmarket.com), where local designers showcase and sell their wares. San Francisco Fashion Week (www.fashionweek-sf.com), launched in 2004, continues to gain steam.
Ghirardelli’s Chocolate Shop
Alamy
Souvenir cable cars
Nowitz Photography/Apa Publications
WHERE TO SHOP
Downtown
San Francisco’s shopping pulse thumps most wildly in the Union Square neighborhood. Streets are stacked with elegant emporia (Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Barney’s New York, and Nordstrom and Bloomingdales inside the Westfield Centre) and glossy boutiques for international designers such as Cartier, Chanel, Coach, Gucci, Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Thomas Pink, and Wilkes Bashford. Also here are major American retail outposts (the GAP, Williams-Sonoma, Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, H&M, Forever 21) and San Francisco institutions such as Gumps, Scheuer Linens, and Britex Fabrics.
For the best selection of antiques, head to historic Jackson Square (www.jacksonsquaresf.com), on the southwest corner of the Financial District. On the other side of the Financial District is the Ferry Building, a go-to for gourmands and homebodies, with upscale food purveyors, home and garden shops, and an outstanding farmers’ market on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
Window display in Telegraph Hill
Nowitz Photography/Apa Publications
Best streets for boutique hopping
Pacific Heights’ Fillmore Street (between Post and Pacific) and Presidio Heights’ Sacramento Street (between Lyon and Maple) offer a wealth of luxury delicacies, particularly high-end clothing and interior-decor shops. If European shoes, Florentine soaps, and vintage French furnishings are out of your budget, these are still picturesque streets on which to window-shop.
Also devoid of chains, Hayes Street (between Franklin and Laguna) in Hayes Valley is a cheerfully artsy and unique mix of art galleries, cafés, eateries, and boutiques supplying posh footwear, mod travel accessories, handsome home furnishings, upscale body products, and obscure sake.
Sophisticated clusters of jewelry shops, mainstream beauty outlets, clothing boutiques, and chic eateries make Cow Hollow one of the most popular high-end shopping destinations in the city. Try Union Street (between Franklin and Steiner) and Chestnut (from Fillmore Street to Divisadero).
The Mission, meanwhile, offers more varied fare: ethnic threads, Latin jazz CDs, refurbished furniture, fedoras and porkpies, politico literature, unusual housewares, independent designer boutiques, and curiosity shops.
Other neighborhoods
North of Market Street, Chinatown is a bustling bazaar year-round, brimming with tea-selling apothecaries, sidewalk souvenir racks, cramped shops, and fresh-produce stands. Tourists flood Grant Avenue while locals grocery-shop on Stockton Street.
Further north, artsy bookstores, chocolate truffles, Italian bakeries and delicatessens, European lingerie, premium denim, flirty dresses, quaint curios, and antique maps are the order of the day in North Beach.
In posh Russian Hill, Polk Street offers high-end progressive women’s fashion, lacy lingerie, vintage and consignment fare; as it heads south for the Tenderloin, low-end clothing and other eclectic stores are more common.
Down in Japantown, the Japan Center (for more information, click here) supplies everything from vintage silk kimonos to culinary ingredients. Upper Haight offers a scruffy jumble of secondhand, vintage, and contemporary clothing stores, plus trendy shoe shops, independent music stores, and head shops selling all manner of smoking paraphernalia.
In the Castro, expect to find fashionable men’s clothing and gay-oriented specialty stores, and the nation’s largest gay-and-lesbian-themed bookstore.