Audrey Hepburn should had a reason for saying ‘Paris is always a good idea‘. For a woman, the city of love offers more than just romanticism, shopping opportunity for all tastes. For sure, this can be Audrey’s reason to say that 🙂 But beside the down town, there are many shopping options on the outskirts of Paris, outlet malls like La Vallée Village. If you Google ‘Paris’ and ‘outlet’ words together, this will be the first site you find. Since it is this much famous, I decided to give it a try during one of my visits to Paris.
It is a part of an outlet chain with other branches in other locations like London, Frankfurt, Dublin, Munich, Brussels and so on. You can reach easily from Paris center to here by RER trains or special shuttle services that I will give details afterwards. As many other outlet centers, it is designed like a small village (hence the name), with roads, one or two floor buildings as shops and nice cafes around. When you get out of the main train station ‘Val d’Europe’, just turn to your right and there you see the entrance of the village ‘La Vallee’.
There are 109 shops, cafes included. The brands are various from woman’s wear to men’s fashion, from home decoration to shoes and accessorizes. Most of the shops are high-fashion brands like Armani, Burberry, Celine, Versace, Dolce &Gabbana and Valentino. Besides that you can find, middle-class brands like Diesel, Guess, Lacoste and Superdry. What I like most is there are some brands that I’ve never seen their outlets in any European city before like Michael Kors, Charles Tyrwhitt and Cath Kidston. (You remember this ‘candy shop’ like Kidston? Even you don’t remember the name, when you see their well-known patterns that they use on bags, sleeves, napkins and boxes, you will understand what I mean 😉 )
A small detail I noticed also, there are small notes about the brand and it’s style, on the windows of every shop. Clever idea 😉
So I can hear you asking: “what about the prices?” So here we come to the point of my decision about this mall. I don’t know you but I don’t do all my shopping from high-fashion brands every time. I have my own designer pieces of course, but they don’t occupy big part of my closet, because of the prices 😦 Therefore, I can only do my designer shopping if I see a good bargain like 50 percent discount or beyond. Since it is an ‘outlet mall’, I was expecting more reductions than what I found there. Overall I can say there is 20 to 40 percent discount on high-fashion brands, and for me this is not enough to call a mall ‘outlet’ and to spend one whole day to go out of town to do my shopping there. I think, you can catch these kind of reductions in down-town shops of these brands also, at some certain times.
Here you can see an example of a nice Valentino bag. 2014 season price is 990 euros, now reduced to 590. So the reduction is around 40 percent.
But when you go to the middle-class brands, you will see more reductions like Apostrophe or Ralph Lauren (my very favorite 🙂 )
After the exit of ‘The Vallee’ there is another shopping center, with casual brands and season prices. You can have your shopping break there, since there are many restaurants and cafes. If you have children in your tour group, there is an aquarium also. Of course, no need to say that this shopping center is a stone’s throw distance from Disneyland Park.
What makes me surprised there, it was my first time seeing a ‘nail polish-matic’. 6 euros each, nail colors of every shade is ready for your use any time you want. If you are like me, remembering nail polish just before leaving home, therefore getting out with still wet and after damaged nail polish, this is a brilliant service for us 😉
And let’s talk about how you can get there. If you are already in Paris you can take the special shuttle, check the details from the site of La Vallee. But besides that by RER trains, which is connected to city’s main metro network, it is very easy to reach there. You need to take the RER line A, direction to Marne-la-Vallee (Parc Disneyland) and get off at the Val d’Europe station.
If you want to visit Disneyland, or have a quiet day without rushing to the Paris center after a tiring shopping day, there are many nice hotels around. (and not very expensive, comparing to Paris center)
In conclusion, if you have a huge budget for designer brand shopping, not searching for big discounts in a ‘real outlet mall sense’ or if you don’t have limited days to visit Paris, you can pay a visit here just to check what is going on. But if you want to be in Paris during all your vacation, there is no need to spend your whole day to come here, since there are many better shopping opportunities in Paris, without leaving the center. And for better outlet deals in Europe, stay tuned because in my next post I will introduce my favorite outlet mall 😉
exquis moi 