LONDON — Diane von Furstenberg last week unveiled a recent physical store in Hong Kong at the favored, upscale shopping center Harbour City shopping in Tsim Sha Tsui.

The opening of the roughly 1,000-square-foot store marks the brand’s return to the Hong Kong offline retail market after a two-year hiatus. The brand operated a store in Landmark, a luxury shopping center in Central, pre-pandemic.

The brand new space comes with a clean and stylish interior design with a flowing glass curtain wall, water mill marble flooring, and gold-plated titanium display racks, showcasing the newest collections. The boutique also highlights DVF’s iconic black-and-white chainlink print and signature graphic.

During COVID-19, the land border between mainland China and Hong Kong was shut, which led to sharp declines in retail sales. For the primary five months of 2020, retail sales decreased by 34.8 percent compared with the identical period in 2019.

But because the starting of this yr, as mainland tourists returned, Hong Kong has logged consecutive six-month growth in retail sales, with May figures rising 18.4 percent from a yr earlier.

Riding the momentum, DVF said the brand new store bears “great significance” to its expansion plan within the Greater China region, as “Hong Kong has long been thought to be the middle of Asian fashion and certainly one of the busiest industrial and financial centers on the planet.”

“With the continual improvement of the macro environment in the worldwide fashion and luxury industry and the reignited enthusiasm of consumers within the Greater China region, we consider that there will probably be more opportunities and space within the Hong Kong market,” the brand added.

Jessie Chen, global partner of DVF and president of DVF China, described the brand new store as a “milestone for the brand within the Asia Pacific region, and we hope to bring a recent shopping experience to Hong Kong’s fashion consumers.”

In an earlier interview with WWD, von Furstenberg said her biggest client in the course of the pandemic was her Chinese distributor Chen, who has been exclusively operating the DVF franchisee business in China from 2011 to the current via a partnership under Shanghai Fairywood Co.

In October 2020, the brand entered a partnership with Glamel Trading Ltd., a Hong Kong-based firm that’s also owned by Chen. Glamel is now the exclusive operations partner with DVF worldwide. High Fashion is the factory in China that has been DVF’s supply chain partner for 25 years, and partners with Glamel and DVF to make DVF womenswear.

“It was very necessary that I continued the connection with them,” said von Furstenberg, adding that the DVF online flagship is on Tmall Luxury Pavillion and a stand-alone DVF China site will probably be launched in 2024.