Bottega and Beyond

I finally made it to the Design District. This sophisticated shopping corridor on the north side of Interstate 195 owes its existence to the real estate developer Craig Robins, who invested $25 million at the beginning of the last decade, transforming a pocket of furniture showroom warehouses into a walkable, stylish outdoor mall.

In just five years, top brands sprouted up here like expensive mushrooms — Christian Louboutin, Maison Martin Margiela, Fendi Casa. Thomas Maier, Bottega Veneta’s creative director, opened his first shop under his own name. The Design District gives off a very specific vibe — that luxury-laced, large-format-glossy-fashion-magazine kind of vibe. In other words, there are no dollar stores here. It’s the kind of place where, say, Kate Hudson or Eva Longoria can comfortably come meet for lunch and talk about baby bumps.

That may be enough to scare some of you off, but thankfully all that snazz is tempered with a handful of independent stores and designers like En Avance, which moved to the area from its former location in South Beach a couple of years ago, and offers a fun, eclectic selection of high fashion. Though much of the merch is in the nosebleed price range, the store feels friendly and un-intimidating enough that you feel you can try stuff on and at least fantasize. Thankfully, Robins and the other ambitious developers have kept rents reasonable in some areas here, to nurture young talent.

A little off the main Design District drag, on 38th Street, there’s a strip of less swanky storefronts where artists and designers have set up studios. These include Nektar de Stagni, an innovative jewelry designer whose work beams with creativity and a sense of humor — her bracelets mix plastic beads with hexagonal quartz, and her snake-like jeweled necklaces are covered in sleeves of sheer fabric. There are also stores here that remind you that this city harbors a more tropical kind of chic. Like Ornare, the Brazilian furniture manufacturer, famous for its gorgeous closet designs. These are the kind of beautiful walk-in wonderlands that people like Beyoncé, Carrie Bradshaw and Scarface would have.

Travel a few streets south and you can find The Shops at Midtown Miami, a more worn-in walking mall for people with more modest credit limits, complete with a Payless Shoe Source, a Marshalls, a Loehmann’s, scuffed-up sidewalks and big outdoor planters filled with scratchy-looking vegetation. There is something balancing to know that all this exists just blocks from a place where you can spend thousands of dollars upgrading your closet.

The day I walked around the Design District it was strangely empty. If it wasn’t for the occasional car I would have thought I was in some post-apocalypse scene. Friends insist that this place livens up at night, but walking around in the daytime, it reminded me of Robertson Boulevard in Los Angeles, another street of clean and hip stores that is a hugely popular social center but strangely never seems to have much foot traffic. Still, this is what Miami needed in order to elevate itself — a sleek, stylish, stiletto-heeled section to act as the city’s fashionable lookbook. Perhaps it’s an unwritten rule of city planning: you aren’t a major metropolis until you’ve got an enclave of outsized chicness and near-unreal aspirations.

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