The global shopping map has been redrawn, and your flight plan may be outdated. For years, Paris was the reflex splurge and Tokyo the “culture trip with a little shopping on the side.” The most committed shoppers now build routes around Seoul’s dermatology corridors and Singapore’s air-conditioned superblocks, where retail, dining, and leisure sit under the same pane of glass. This year’s Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Awards for shopping confirm the shift: half of our top ten destinations sit in East and Southeast Asia, where the future of retail is already playing out in beauty labs, skybridge megamalls, and night markets. The dominance of Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Bangkok marks Asia’s rise as the global arbiter of retail futurism, where brands launch serums that will not hit Bergdorf’s for sixteen months, and where twenty-somethings queue at 5 a.m. for Supreme drops while their mothers negotiate Birkins in Ginza’s secondhand luxury boutiques—and where staff can spot a fake stitch from across a showroom.
Europe’s fashion capitals, meanwhile, endure through reinvention, their centuries-old maisons sharing streetscapes with carbon-negative boutiques selling €3,000 sneakers grown from mushroom leather. At the other end of the spectrum, Cape Town and Dublin, this year’s wildcards, demonstrate how powerful shopping can become when it is anchored in local makers, charity shop circuits, and the rhythms of daily life, rather than legacy logos. Taken together, they make the case that the most magnetic destinations now sell premises, not just products: the promise of transformation, the theater of discovery, and the idea that the right purchase might sharpen, or at least briefly upgrade, the person toting the bag. These are the top 10 cities for the best shopping cities around the world, according to our readers.
Seoul is a living and breathing test lab for how people want to live, dress, and take care of themselves next.
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1. Seoul
Shopping in Seoul operates on two timelines at once: 600-year-old markets and hanok villages holding the line on craft, and a K-beauty ecosystem that treats launches like software updates. That collision is why people now fly in with half-empty suitcases and saved-location spreadsheets. Start in Seongsu-dong, where Amorepacific has turned a former car repair shop into a beauty lab, layering custom lipstick counters over monthly art shows so retail feels like research. Gwangjang Market pulls the camera back to old Seoul, alleyways festooned with vintage silk hanboks hang just a few steps away from ajummas frying bindaetteok—proving that shopping and eating are essentially the same activity here. Then swing into Myeongdong, where Olive Young’s flagship store serves as a live dashboard for cosmetic innovation, its Trend Zone updating stock based on what Koreans are actually searching for before the rest of the world catches up.
On the luxury side, Cheongdam pairs 10 Corso Como with Sulwhasoo’s flagship, where you can book a TUS Moon Jade Hand Service between ginseng cream consults. Nearby, Garosugil frames Tamburins’ sculptural perfume balms along tree-lined streets, while Bukchon’s alleys hide appointment-only buncheong ceramics at Yiyeha and personalized perfume engraving at Granhand. Together, the city reads less like a set of districts than a test lab for how people want to live, dress, and take care of themselves next.
