Is online shopping dead?
At times, it feels like it. These days, all the best finds are in the most curated boutiques, but what feels like a sudden turnaround has been a long time in the making. For lifelong shoppers like Ruby Redstone, co-owner of the recently opened West Village boutique Mess, there was a tangible shift in the retail scene when stores such as New York’s Opening Ceremony, Totokaelo, and Barneys shuttered their doors in what felt like one fell swoop. “We felt like we had run out of places where we like to shop as New Yorkers,” she says.
What those shops offered was a sense of discovery—wander into Opening Ceremony and you could discover emerging brands, like Telfar at the time, sitting alongside the latest Margiela pieces. Then came the pandemic. Shopping moved online, and with this change came the boom of online retailers like Ssense. There, items were almost always on sale, offering up luxury designer goods at up to 80% off. Soon, that bubble also burst. In late 2025 the retailer sought bankruptcy protection as news broke that the company owed designers both big and small millions of dollars.
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Call it a symptom of return-to-office or a craving for community, but plenty of stores are now registering an in-person shift. Customers want human interactions, they want curation, and most importantly, they want the feeling of a fashion hunt. Sometimes, the more delayed the gratification, the better. “I think people are starved to shop in-person,” says Gina Esposito, co-founder of the Williamsburg, Brooklyn boutique Tangerine, where you can find a tightly edited selection of both homeware and independent fashion. She points to digital fatigue as a reason for the store’s uptick in traffic: “There is nothing like shopping in-person—touching and feeling and trying on and not having to make so many returns, unboxing, and re-boxing. It’s exhausting!”
Bomi is a small, three-year-old lifestyle and fashion boutique located on the second floor of a building in SoHo: You can’t just wander in from the street, but that’s exactly the point. “You buzz the door, and you come up the stairs, and it just really feels like you’re coming to your friend’s house,” says founder Bomi Jin. “It feels more intimate.” The boutique has amassed a bit of a cult following by carrying a selection of cult brands, including Tekla, Thistles, Amomento, Simuero, and Flore Flore, and counts around 700 visitors in foot traffic a week.
