Bonifacio High Street Central: The fashionista’s new mecca

We’re all familiar with Bonifacio High Street’s charms, but the shopping and dining hub just got more exciting with Bonifacio High Street Central, a sleek new mall across BHS’s strip that offers even more shopping and dining options, not to mention the country’s first 4DX theater.

But what really excites me about BHS Central is the lifestyle lineup, some of which have opened their first and only stores there, like home mecca Pottery Barn, Italian luxury footwear brand Casadei, and London fashion house Karen Millen.

I also wanted to make a beeline for the Diptyque store, but a fashion tour with celebrity stylist Charmaine Palermo and host Kelly Misa was about to start. My scented candles would have to wait.

Palermo, best known for her work on Pinoy Idol and Let the Love Begin, guided us through five outlets that exemplified Bonifacio High Street Central’s eclectic fashion mix, and gave us tips on how to work the latest trends in each.

We were also presented with a style challenge that consisted of listening to Charmaine’s tips, putting together an outfit based on those tips, photographing it and then posting to Instagram. Needless to say, after scouring five stores for suitable pieces to create fashionable ensembles, I found out that being a stylist isn’t as easy as it looks.

Our first stop was Ever New, an Australian brand that specializes in what Palermo calls “resort chic.” Florals, pastels and whites abound, making Ever New ideal if you’re shopping for a flirty, feminine, fun ensemble for a garden or tea party.

Palermo’s tip is to mix patterns and prints, which you can do safely as long as the prints are from the same color palette and your colors blend together. For example, you can throw a solid-colored blazer over a printed outfit, or a use a belt to break up the pattern.

Next, we went to Mango, one of BHS Central’s go-tos for staples and trends, along with reliable favorites Cotton On and Promod.

Kelly Misa noted that basics are “every girl’s problem,” referring to that familiar dilemma of opening our closets and finding “nothing to wear.”

Palermo’s solution? Have a basic wardrobe that you can mix seasonal trends with. Hers consists of only five pieces:

1. A white button-down shirt

2. A blazer and matching pencil skirt

3. Trousers

4. A little black dress

5. Denim jeans

After we learned this lesson in basics, we then visited trendy British label Karen Millen, where Palermo wanted us to hunt up a mod ’60s-type outfit for a cocktail party. Millen has a surfeit of cute retro dresses that you can dress up or down, depending on whether you pair them with flats, heels, or metallic boots. A lot of them have quirky details, which minimizes the need for accessories. “Maybe just a cocktail ring or necklace,” Palermo suggests.

For stylistas who prefer more classic and timeless silhouettes, BHS Central houses Banana Republic, Anne Klein, CK Jeans, DKNY and Kenneth Cole New York, where our challenge was day-to-night dressing. Thanks to the holiday season and traffic situation, going home to change for an evening event just isn’t within the realm of feasibility anymore, so we had to concoct an ensemble that could take us “from coffee to cocktails.”

Palermo advises wearing basics to work and then adding accessories for night, like a statement necklace, or simply changing your hairstyle or sweeping on some red lipstick.

After four fashion challenges most of the journalists started to flag, so our last stop was Diesel, one of BHS Central’s edgier, more modern stores, along with Y3 by Yohji Yamamoto, Desigual, Muji, G-Star Raw, and General.

There Palermo instructed us to be on the lookout for denim, and use it as the basis for a military-inspired look. “Denim is the workhorse of any wardrobe; fortunately there are many ways to wear denim,” she said. “Trends include patches, tattered jeans, boyfriend jeans, and there’s lots of influence from the current military trend — lots of camouflage embellishments and details.”

Fortunately Diesel had a lot of cool military coats and denim, so I finished this challenge with relative ease.

On our way to TWG for refreshment we passed BHS Central’s watch and accessory stores like Charriol, Pandora, Rolex, Breitling, IWC, and Jaeger-Le Coultre. 

The entire Bonifacio High Street complex features themed zones in eight buildings along twin boulevards that offer the best in lifestyle shopping, from fashion to food, beauty and home to sports, technology, and special interests.

Another highlight is the interactive park between the two boulevards, where both kids and pets like to frolic.

As we settled in for afternoon tea at TWG, I made a mental note to come back and shop at the stores I’d missed, like Y3 and Pottery Barn, and, of course, to score some of those Diptyque scented candles.

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