The verdict is in on Mecca's new flagship store, and it's a winner
At the crowded store preview for beauty lovers, influencers and media, the elbows were out and the extensions were in as people raced to experience hair treatments, fragrance consultations, skin analysis and the cafeteria before the side doors open to the public on Friday (the front doors should be operational by November).
Three years ago, if I had been standing in the mall opposite Myer, I would have been in the David Jones menswear store instead of drowning in a sea of women who have conquered contouring and fake eyelash application. The former home of suits and designer Y-fronts has been lavishly transformed into a literal Mecca for women.
This may be a woman's world but here is the well-moisturised man's view. If you're worried about my qualifications, I've been writing about beauty since I went to France in 2009 to see how Chanel No.5 is made and have been obsessed with skincare since Olay was Oil of Ulan.
The look: At 4000 square metres, it's big. The CJ Olive Young flagship in Seoul, Korea, is a larger beauty destination at a reported 4628 square metres, but stores are like pimples: bigger isn't always better.
For most Melburnians, it should be enough that the footprint is more than twice the size of Sydney's Mecca flagship on George Street. This should have them smiling before seeing the extensive range of skincare, spanning from $27 lip balms by Zoe Foster Blake's brand, Go-To, to the $864 Augustinus Bader moisturisers.
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'I've never ever seen a store like it,' says UK hair colourist Josh Wood, who has worked with Kylie Minogue and David Beckham. Wood has opened his first salon outside the UK in the building. 'I've been looking at the plans for two years but when I walked through the doors, I was completely blown away. It's the future of beauty.'
There's a sense of discovery as you wander from brow bars with Hollywood mirror lighting to Charlotte Tilbury foundations taking root beneath a golden palm tree. The cavernous space is artfully divided by texture, colour and curtains across three floors.
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News.com.au
2 days ago
- News.com.au
Aussies line at 4am as Mecca's new flagship store in Melbourne opens
At 4am on a Friday morning, most Aussies would still be in bed, or maybe up with the kids and already nursing their first cup of coffee for the day. But at that early hour, while just a mere 5C outside and still dark, hundreds of people - if not thousands - braved the cold Melbourne weather to be among the first to step inside a new three-storey megashop that has been almost four years in the making. In fact, the crowd was so huge, a large segment of Bourke Street, the heart of the city's CBD, was shut down - not even trams could enter despite it being peak rush hour. So what on earth could cause such a commotion? The answer is Australian beauty retailer, Mecca. Its new flagship store is located in the centre of the Bourke Street Mall, and the absolutely massive retail space - which measures an astounding 4000-square-metres - is three times the size of its current flagship in Sydney. Featuring over 80 different services, including many of the store's tried and tested favourites, there's also a host of newness, including an apothecary selling a selection of 'surprising' products such as crystals, acupuncture treatments and even gut-boosting powders. There's also a gift wrapping counter, a 'beauty atelier' where customers can get their hair, make-up, and nails done, and a fragrance gallery that promises to dazzle noses with delightful scents selected by expert sommeliers. To really complete the Melbourne experience, the store even has its own cafe, serving up coffee alongside croissants from the 'world famous' Lune bakery. It seems the offering is too good to resist, with thousands of Aussies making the pilgrimage to visit the store on its first day of trading, despite a very large crowd. Millie, 19, was one of the first in line, waking up at 3.30am at her Fitzroy home before catching an Uber into the city. 'I got here just before 4.30am and was amazed that there were already some people here before me,' she told 'The doors don't open until 9, but I just know it will be worth the wait.' Not everyone braved the queue at the crack of dawn, with some arriving at around 7am, when the queue 'officially opened'. Work mates Gigi and Holly both travelled in from Richmond, and decided to get in line before heading to the office. 'We work in the building just next door, so we thought if everything is going on, we may as well get some of the free goodies,' Holly said. 'The gifts are pretty decent actually, Mecca have given everyone the same boxes, it's full of stuff.' Just before 9am, Mecca Founder and Co-CEO, Jo Horgan, addressed the crowd, thanking eager-shoppers for venturing out on a 'particularly chilly day'. 'It's genuinely overwhelming in the most wonderful way,' she told 'From the very beginning, we've wanted Mecca to be more than a store - a place where people feel seen, celebrated, and uplifted. 'To see our community show up in such force is energising. This space was created side-by-side with our customers in mind, and their response tells us that they feel it. It's joy, wonder, and connection - and we're so grateful.' After Horgan's welcome, the doors to the 'biggest beauty store in the world' swung open, introducing the masses to its 'treasures'. Shelves were fully stacked with all the staples, with haircare, beauty and skincare, taking up 'the majority' of the space. But one of the most unexpected offerings at the new Mecca is located inside its seven treatment rooms. 'You can now get injectables, they have three qualified injectors here, never thought I'd see the day,' said beauty influencer Gemma Diamond. The chaos of opening day continued inside, with customers pouring in like ants, a scene that can truly only be described as 'absolutely bonkers'. 'I knew it would be busy, but it's like there's a celebrity in town,' said Maisie, a 24-year-old from outer Melbourne suburb, Lilydale. 'I don't mind though, it's part of the fun, it's such a vibe.' It seems not even facing more queues inside - the need for caffeine apparently is high - can dampen spirits. Loud music blasts out of speakers throughout the store, turning the retail space into a sober nightclub, with shoppers shaking their shoulders as they pop goodies into their baskets. 'Every inch of the store is designed for people to play, learn, and feel amazing, aligning with our purpose to embolden through beauty, helping people to look, feel and be their best,' Horgan told 'Whether it's the feel of a luxurious moisturiser, the scent that lifts your mood, or the colour that changes your entire day - it's about real, human connection.' The beauty mogul added that the experience was 'really emotional', reflecting on how far Mecca has come since opening the first 60 square metre store in 1997. 'It honestly feels like yesterday, back then, I had no idea what MECCA would become,' she explained. 'This doesn't just feel monumental for me - it feels monumental for our team, and for the community who've supported Mecca from the very beginning.' Due to the sheer magnitude of the venue, which has previously been home to a wealth of different brands and local institutions, maps are on offer to help customers find their way around. Before Mecca's takeover, it housed Edward William Cole's iconic Cole's Book Arcade from 1883 to 1929,a literary funhouse once described as Melbourne's 'greatest attraction'. It was then transformed into the architecturally significant building it is today by G.J. Coles in between 1929 and 1930, turning it into the flagship Coles variety store until 1986. Most recently it was the iconic David Jones menswear store until 2020, when it was sold to Newmark Capital, for $121 million, according to the Australian Financial Review.
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Water-cooler chats are the reason we go to work. But who's really listening?
The line between hearing and listening turns out to be about halfway from the door to the water cooler. The conversation sounds from a distance like an overbearing man and a younger woman bickering, but as I get closer, my brain tunes to a more curious frequency. 'I'm on a quest for inspiration,' the man's voice proclaims. 'Inspiration? Love that for you,' his co-worker replies eagerly. 'What kind of stuff are you getting inspired by?' He stammers but she barges on. 'Like, are you into art, music? Maybe you're just, like, considering which experimental sound to get lost in next?' 'They're chatbots,' sound artist Monica Lim explains quietly at my shoulder. The conversing water coolers are Chit + Chat, her contribution to Listening Acts, a series of artworks exploring listening and technology curated by Chamber Made for this month's Now or Never festival. Indicating my own listening technology (aka phone), I ask if it's OK to record them. 'Oh, wow, recording something? That sounds super-interesting,' the overexcited water cooler gushes. 'Are you working on music? Or maybe a podcast or something?' A newspaper article, I tell the, uh, water cooler. 'Oh, wow, a new small product? I totally get it!' She obviously doesn't, which only makes her spookily reminiscent of other water-cooler conversationalists I've known. Bloke water cooler is still blathering pompously: his personality is uncannily real, too. They've been programmed this way, Lim tells me. He's into Bartok and existentialism. She's all K-pop and Millennial-speak. Their voices have been 'stolen' from two of her friends. Questions about empathy, ownership and surveillance swirl as they babble. 'I'll turn them off so we can talk,' Lim says. But are they still listening? That question is one of the easiest proposed by the mind-expanding Listening Acts program. Yes, is the likely answer, and so are Siri and Alexa and who knows what else. It was the first thing Lim thought of when Chamber Made asked her and eight other sound artists to create a work at the intersection of listening, technology and the body. 'It started with the idea of surveillance; machines listening to us,' she says. 'But then the more I worked with the chatbots, the more interesting it seemed to me to listen to them. This idea of the water-cooler conversation, we say that's the important part of being at work … It's that human connection. So it's sort of symbolic of the workplace, but at the same time, we are being replaced so much by machines. Loading 'I was thinking that not so far in the future, the water-cooler conversations will be machines just talking to themselves, or us talking to machines, and them listening to us and pretending to be human.' Whatever human means by then. The very idea is being tested in all kinds of ways as technology hijacks and directs and misdirects how and what we listen to in the age of machines. Chit + Chat is just the foyer attraction. The other Listening Acts – six installations and three performances in all – have been commissioned to occupy conference rooms, bespoke booths and concert spaces throughout the Melbourne Recital Centre over three days. 'We set this framing, a kind of provocation,' says Chamber Made curator Tamara Saulwick, 'and invited a series of artists to come together. And of course, artists are these beautiful, unpredictable creatures who take ideas into areas you hadn't anticipated.' The larger framing of the City of Melbourne's Now or Never festival – now in its third year of 'exploring art, ideas, sound and technology' – is a gift for an experimental arts company that has long pushed at the edges of sound, music and contemporary performance. Saulwick's own installation, with composer/musician Peter Knight, also delves into the unsettling idea of the human voice disassociated from the body by technology. Myself in That Moment uses splintered and digitised song and speech refracted through the same devices that mediate so much of our lives. 'You come into a darkened space and approach multiple screens of 25 tablets in a grid,' she says. 'We see a kind of portrait that becomes increasingly fractured … It becomes almost like a vortex, like you're sitting inside a whirlpool of sound that moves around you.' The sound material comes from recordings of three singers using extended vocal techniques and intimate breath work. 'There's one section where it goes into these verbatim materials of them discussing what it means to be captured and recorded and disseminated; to be made digital.' Elsewhere in the building, curious listeners might slip on headphones for Aviva Endean's Tactile Piece for Human Ears, a binaural soundscape shaped by wind currents, pipe tones and underwater vibrations. Or lend an ear to echoes of the stolen generations via a motion-activated plait of hair in Anna Liebzeit's With Ghosts: A Choreography of Presence. Alexandra Spence's sounding forms/forming sounds is a meditative sound field of sine waves, Perspex and drums designed to be felt. Rebecca Bracewell's Accordion without Organs loops an accordion through cassettes and amplifiers, each iteration veiling the last in layers of hiss. Thembi Soddell's In Silence offers a one-on-one audiovisual experience grappling with intergenerational trauma and identity. Threaded throughout is a persistent invitation to slow down, take notice and feel the weight between sound and story. Memory, and the mysterious ways in which sound captures and conjures it, looms large. Loading In Cathedral Reverb, Hannah de Feyter invites one listener at a time into a darkened booth to experience a soundscape built entirely from the remnants of sound — reverb, echo, resonance, delay. Her work is a personalised echo, in turn, of American experimental composer Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room. 'My first memory,' she says, 'is the sound of my father singing this old hymn in a darkened room.' Playing with the ancient concept of mnemotechnics, she uses technology to construct a physical space for the memory to live in. 'Because I grew up in the church, I've been experimenting with reverb presets that are all churches.' With the reverb of infinite churches more or less in your phone now, how far off can time travel be? Machines are amazing, clearly, when they're not disturbing or even terrifying. Heard from the doorway, the technology involved in Biddy Connor's Song to the Cell – inspired by the sounds she heard from IV machines when she started chemotherapy in October 2020 – seems kind of forbidding. But again, leaning in to listen reveals miracles. 'I call this one Gemini and this one Alaris,' she says, citing the brand names as she threads plastic tubes coursing with fluid through two IV machines. They click and beep, shuffle and bubble in a way that almost swings. 'I've got hours and hours of recordings of the IV machines,' Connor says. 'On that first day, it was hearing those sounds that helped me. I could hear the bass lines in there, and that distracted me in a good way.' Her song cycle takes its name from The Song of the Cell, the Siddhartha Mukherjee book that explores how our bodies are built and repaired. Its sound and intention owes something to the Cocteau Twins' version of Song for the Siren, Connor says. She sings live with the machines – sometimes solo, sometimes in textural counterpoint – using effects and surround sound to create a kind of existential lullaby. These machine sounds are purely functional. But they are also deeply emotionally charged. 'Probably because I'm a certain amount of time away from the treatment now, it doesn't feel raw any more. But the alarms still give me a bit of anxiety,' she says with a laugh.
The Age
2 days ago
- The Age
Water-cooler chats are the reason we go to work. But who's really listening?
The line between hearing and listening turns out to be about halfway from the door to the water cooler. The conversation sounds from a distance like an overbearing man and a younger woman bickering, but as I get closer, my brain tunes to a more curious frequency. 'I'm on a quest for inspiration,' the man's voice proclaims. 'Inspiration? Love that for you,' his co-worker replies eagerly. 'What kind of stuff are you getting inspired by?' He stammers but she barges on. 'Like, are you into art, music? Maybe you're just, like, considering which experimental sound to get lost in next?' 'They're chatbots,' sound artist Monica Lim explains quietly at my shoulder. The conversing water coolers are Chit + Chat, her contribution to Listening Acts, a series of artworks exploring listening and technology curated by Chamber Made for this month's Now or Never festival. Indicating my own listening technology (aka phone), I ask if it's OK to record them. 'Oh, wow, recording something? That sounds super-interesting,' the overexcited water cooler gushes. 'Are you working on music? Or maybe a podcast or something?' A newspaper article, I tell the, uh, water cooler. 'Oh, wow, a new small product? I totally get it!' She obviously doesn't, which only makes her spookily reminiscent of other water-cooler conversationalists I've known. Bloke water cooler is still blathering pompously: his personality is uncannily real, too. They've been programmed this way, Lim tells me. He's into Bartok and existentialism. She's all K-pop and Millennial-speak. Their voices have been 'stolen' from two of her friends. Questions about empathy, ownership and surveillance swirl as they babble. 'I'll turn them off so we can talk,' Lim says. But are they still listening? That question is one of the easiest proposed by the mind-expanding Listening Acts program. Yes, is the likely answer, and so are Siri and Alexa and who knows what else. It was the first thing Lim thought of when Chamber Made asked her and eight other sound artists to create a work at the intersection of listening, technology and the body. 'It started with the idea of surveillance; machines listening to us,' she says. 'But then the more I worked with the chatbots, the more interesting it seemed to me to listen to them. This idea of the water-cooler conversation, we say that's the important part of being at work … It's that human connection. So it's sort of symbolic of the workplace, but at the same time, we are being replaced so much by machines. Loading 'I was thinking that not so far in the future, the water-cooler conversations will be machines just talking to themselves, or us talking to machines, and them listening to us and pretending to be human.' Whatever human means by then. The very idea is being tested in all kinds of ways as technology hijacks and directs and misdirects how and what we listen to in the age of machines. Chit + Chat is just the foyer attraction. The other Listening Acts – six installations and three performances in all – have been commissioned to occupy conference rooms, bespoke booths and concert spaces throughout the Melbourne Recital Centre over three days. 'We set this framing, a kind of provocation,' says Chamber Made curator Tamara Saulwick, 'and invited a series of artists to come together. And of course, artists are these beautiful, unpredictable creatures who take ideas into areas you hadn't anticipated.' The larger framing of the City of Melbourne's Now or Never festival – now in its third year of 'exploring art, ideas, sound and technology' – is a gift for an experimental arts company that has long pushed at the edges of sound, music and contemporary performance. Saulwick's own installation, with composer/musician Peter Knight, also delves into the unsettling idea of the human voice disassociated from the body by technology. Myself in That Moment uses splintered and digitised song and speech refracted through the same devices that mediate so much of our lives. 'You come into a darkened space and approach multiple screens of 25 tablets in a grid,' she says. 'We see a kind of portrait that becomes increasingly fractured … It becomes almost like a vortex, like you're sitting inside a whirlpool of sound that moves around you.' The sound material comes from recordings of three singers using extended vocal techniques and intimate breath work. 'There's one section where it goes into these verbatim materials of them discussing what it means to be captured and recorded and disseminated; to be made digital.' Elsewhere in the building, curious listeners might slip on headphones for Aviva Endean's Tactile Piece for Human Ears, a binaural soundscape shaped by wind currents, pipe tones and underwater vibrations. Or lend an ear to echoes of the stolen generations via a motion-activated plait of hair in Anna Liebzeit's With Ghosts: A Choreography of Presence. Alexandra Spence's sounding forms/forming sounds is a meditative sound field of sine waves, Perspex and drums designed to be felt. Rebecca Bracewell's Accordion without Organs loops an accordion through cassettes and amplifiers, each iteration veiling the last in layers of hiss. Thembi Soddell's In Silence offers a one-on-one audiovisual experience grappling with intergenerational trauma and identity. Threaded throughout is a persistent invitation to slow down, take notice and feel the weight between sound and story. Memory, and the mysterious ways in which sound captures and conjures it, looms large. Loading In Cathedral Reverb, Hannah de Feyter invites one listener at a time into a darkened booth to experience a soundscape built entirely from the remnants of sound — reverb, echo, resonance, delay. Her work is a personalised echo, in turn, of American experimental composer Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room. 'My first memory,' she says, 'is the sound of my father singing this old hymn in a darkened room.' Playing with the ancient concept of mnemotechnics, she uses technology to construct a physical space for the memory to live in. 'Because I grew up in the church, I've been experimenting with reverb presets that are all churches.' With the reverb of infinite churches more or less in your phone now, how far off can time travel be? Machines are amazing, clearly, when they're not disturbing or even terrifying. Heard from the doorway, the technology involved in Biddy Connor's Song to the Cell – inspired by the sounds she heard from IV machines when she started chemotherapy in October 2020 – seems kind of forbidding. But again, leaning in to listen reveals miracles. 'I call this one Gemini and this one Alaris,' she says, citing the brand names as she threads plastic tubes coursing with fluid through two IV machines. They click and beep, shuffle and bubble in a way that almost swings. 'I've got hours and hours of recordings of the IV machines,' Connor says. 'On that first day, it was hearing those sounds that helped me. I could hear the bass lines in there, and that distracted me in a good way.' Her song cycle takes its name from The Song of the Cell, the Siddhartha Mukherjee book that explores how our bodies are built and repaired. Its sound and intention owes something to the Cocteau Twins' version of Song for the Siren, Connor says. She sings live with the machines – sometimes solo, sometimes in textural counterpoint – using effects and surround sound to create a kind of existential lullaby. These machine sounds are purely functional. But they are also deeply emotionally charged. 'Probably because I'm a certain amount of time away from the treatment now, it doesn't feel raw any more. But the alarms still give me a bit of anxiety,' she says with a laugh.
