Opinion
In February 2019, I was one of about 100 VIPs and media flown to Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) for David Jones’ twice-annual season launch. The event was a who’s who of Australian fashion: Carla Zampatti, Bianca Spender, Rebecca Vallance, and the founders of brands including Aje and Romance was Born. Models. Celebrities. It was the invite of the year.
As I sat next to model Gemma Ward sipping champagne and feasting on an “edible table” of seemingly bottomless seafood, the question everyone was asking themselves was: How good is this? But like most Camelot-esque scenes, another, more ominous question was hovering just off-stage: How long can it last?
As the fashion editor of this masthead from 2016 until 2024, I covered a range of topics, including royal weddings, “superfake” bags and sexual harassment. But few subjects inspired more feedback or chatter among my peers than the so-called “store wars” between David Jones and Myer.
The term was coined to describe the roughly decade-long tussle between the two companies for brands, which were often signed on exclusivity deals, and celebrity ambassadors (and, later, the somewhat cringe-inducing term “friends”).
While at times the war may have been somewhat exaggerated (Megan v Jennifer; Misha v Maticevski; Caulfield v Flemington), its existence meant that when it came to fashion, there was a lot at stake. It helped drive healthy competition between the two department stores, and experts I spoke to throughout agreed it was good for retail, and good for Australian fashion.
But at some point, Myer – possibly after losing many of its Australian designer brands to David Jones in the great exodus of 2017-18 – lost its passion for fashion. Arguably, the greatest signpost of this was in 2018 when Toni Maticevski, considered one of the greatest couturiers this country has produced, ended a 15-year deal with Myer before signing exclusively with David Jones.
By 2022, I would describe Myer as a brand that had deserted fashion in favour of “dressing middle Australia”. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, but instead of David Jones taking the free kick and resurrecting itself as a place where customers, through great service, can discover new brands, it simply stopped trying.
The lavish store launches went from rad to sad, to the point where they barely registered interest with the fashion press. And while COVID-19, interest rate rises, the onslaught of ultra-fast fashion, cost-of-living pressures and hybrid working have all tempered Australians’ need for designer clothing, somewhere the maxim “buy less, choose well” (to quote Vivienne Westwood) became “don’t buy at all”.
Ask any former rusted-on David Jones customer where things went wrong and, overwhelmingly, the response is, “There is just no one to serve you.” You don’t need to run an expensive market research to see it, you just need to walk through one of its ailing stores at midday on a Wednesday and the neglect is palpable.
Of course, there are always exceptions. The staff in the Melbourne personal styling suite are second to none, as was the shoe department leader who went out of her way to help me recently when a pair of designer heels I’d ordered arrived with one shoe noticeably larger than the other (sadly, she was unable to source me a replacement pair and arranged a refund).
But it’s too little too late.
The fashion brands, many of which have fled back across the aisle to Myer (on presumably more attractive terms than David Jones’ 60-day payments, which few small brands can afford) have spoken. The customers have spoken. And, as we stare down the real possibility of a department store monopoly in this country, we all stand to lose. As I write this, I am saddest for the 6000 David Jones staff who face an anxious wait about their futures.
Ten years ago, when I was covering fashion and feasting at bacchanalian launches for both David Jones and Myer (its 2018 event at the Cutaway at Barangaroo will be seared on my brain for all eternity, as will my wonderment at the expense of it all), it was always Myer that was the underdog, the one most likely to fail.
“Australians need Myer to succeed” was a common sentiment I heard.
We all have memories of department stores tied up in the fabric of our lives. Our first Santa photos. Our first bra. Our first high heels. Our wedding registry. Twenty, even 10 years ago, many of these things likely took place inside the walls of a department store. But times changed, and we stopped looking to department stores as arbiters of taste, and centres of discovery. In turn, they stopped innovating, or went for cheap gimmicks (Tesla at Myer, anyone?) that backfired and bred cynicism among customers.
No question the model is broken, as the slow collapse of David Jones is proof. But the writing has been on the wall for some time. The same people who would decry a future in which Australia no longer had its marquee stores are the exact same people who are furiously shopping on Shein and Temu in the small hours under the covers and wondering why our department stores are on their knees.
I will leave it to other commentators to suggest how David Jones can be saved, or whether Myer executive chair Olivia Wirth can avoid making the same mistakes as her predecessors. Both stores are skeletons of the behemoths I used to know.
Maybe we have outgrown them, and they certainly stopped serving us. But we can’t all look around and ask ourselves, “How did this happen?” The real question is why, when we all saw it coming, did we just look – or shop – the other way?
Melissa Singer is associate editor of Sunday Life, and the former fashion editor of this masthead.
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Melissa Singer is Associate Editor of Sunday Life magazine, and was previously national fashion editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.
