Friday March 29th, 2024
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Ted Baker Comes to Town

British ready-to-wear brand Ted Baker finally made its Egyptian debut last week. We headed to the circus-themed grand opening in Cairo Festival City and got a lot more than we bargain for...

Staff Writer

We got invited to the launch of Ted Baker this week, and being suckers for openings wherein pretty people, tasty finger food and freebies are always present, we headed over to the far end of the world, aka Cairo Festival City. The cool British clothing brand's new store looked amazing and we wandered through the rows of pretty clothes, all saturated hues, and watercolour-flower prints, only eyeing them lustfully and not snatching any and just running like bandits through the mall like we really wanted to. We think they went with a carnival theme for the opening, and we would just like to say: brava. Brava Ted Baker. We do love ourselves a good carnival theme, complete with a vintage red-and-white-striped popcorn cart that came right out of the 50s, candy coloured balloons tied at each clothing rack, cake pops (CAKE POPS!), cookies on a stick (is there an official term for these?), and even a cardboard head-in-the-hole photo of a girl sitting on a bear's lap, which we found particularly interesting. See photo below. But listen here, clothing and everything aside, any store launch that decides to randomly involve cake pops in the situation, effectively earns themselves a solid place in our fat kid hearts. 

We wandered around the store, eventually making our way to our goal: the goodies table. It was literally Marie Antoinette's wet dream; a Versailles-style wonderland of cake pops and cupcakes in tiers. After reaching a solid level of sugar high, we were treated to an actual little fashion show in the store itself; rows of models emerged from we can only assume were the changing rooms, decked out in head to toe Ted Baker, both guys and girls, casually doing their catwalk thing down the aisles of the store as upbeat music blasted. The store being, well, the size of an average clothing store, the models were within touching distance. And bravo, good on them, those models – they managed to keep straight faces while being all of 30 centimeters away from our staring eyes and frenzy of flashing phones. We would have cracked the fuck up. Wait hang on, we would never have been asked to model in the first place. Their faces didn't even twitch guys. We swear two of them looked eerily like actual mannequins just come to life, à la little known Lindsay Lohan and Tyra Banks film, Life Size.

But here's a particularly notable little observation about this event: the freakishly high degree of sartorial savvy amongst the attendees who were all basically as well dressed as the models. It was like a fashion blog come to life. Like, a Celine t-shirt tucked into a full tea-length skirt with wild floral print, and edgy heels was the type of outfit present. We've never felt like such shlumps in our lives, what with our regular peasant jeans, boots, and oversized grey tops. Ohh so this is where you don that outfit you couldn't find any appropriate venues/occasions in Cairo to wear. Got it. Sorry, we missed the memo and arrived looking like hobos.

Anyhoo, fun times. We also realised our lifelong dream (evening-long, really) of getting an electric lime green gift bag, and nabbed ourselves some awesome printed tops. Actually, physically leaving the mall was another story altogether; a mindfuck of maze; Frodo's journey to the fires of Mordor recreated in mall setting. The quest of the fellowship of the mall. Whatever, we're suckers for colourful sweets. Were the cake pops worth our torturous misadventure? WERE THEY? Yeah, actually. Cake pops and free tops. Though we very much want to return to Ted Baker because we can't wait to get our hands on their awesome cropped pants and watercolour dresses, we will next time come armed with GPS in order to navigate the mall.