Lookbook : Styling up High Street and Small Shop Finds From Madrid; Shopping In Spain

In my opinion, Madrid is one of the best places to shop. When I first started coming to Madrid with my family as a teenager years ago, I would go crazy over all their local high street brands (Zara, Sfera, Mango, Bershka and etc). I think in terms of high street brands, the Spanish does it the best in world. For those on a budget, they are very ideal as their pieces are very chic and quite good quality, considering they are affordable.

One of the smaller streets in Barrio Salamanca where you can find a variety of shops

Asides from the high street, what I loved from my trip many moons ago was finding so many random shoe and espadrille shops. It didn't matter what their labels were, they were all so gorgeous, chic, great quality and all locally made in Spain ofcourse! Nothing gave me a bigger thrill than seeing an "Hecho en Espana" label on the shoes. Even back then, I have always really been into the more local and independent brands!

When in Spain....espadrilles are a must!

Newsstand in Calle Goya, a big street where a lot of popular high street brands are located

Now that I came back for the first time after more than fifteen years, I feel that Madrid is still one of my favourite places to shop in the world. We stayed at an area called Barrio Salamanca. In this Barrio, you have Calle Serrano and an El Corte Ingles that have all the big name luxury brands. If you're a luxury lover, then this is the place to go! (Also a hot tip - Spain has one of the highest tax refund rate! So make sure you do that when you buy your big ticket items!) But also, they have the big streets like Calle Velasquez and Calle Goya where you can find all the usual high street suspects. What I loved the most though were all the little side streets in between these big ones I mentioned. Here you can spend all day strolling and stumbling upon so many smaller stores! There's a mix of curated and independent labels and even several pop-ups/bazaar types where there were a mix of indie makers and sellers. I loved just walking around all these streets in this neighborhood.

Got some of these rings in a random curated store! So many of these stores all over

Button down dress from Cortefiel, A Spanish high street brand

If it's your first time to go to Madrid, and really want to visit all the usual sights like Puerta del Sol and Gran Via, then I know that there is also a lot of shopping here. We didn't really go here on this trip as we find it a little too busy but we did make it out to the Fuencarral neighborhood which is near the center and to Augusto Figueroa street where you can find a lot of these random shoe and espadrille stores. Theyre all no frills type of stores and nothing super fancy but you can find some really good ones and we even stumbled upon buy one take one deals on leather stilettos! But anyway, you can check that street out for lots more "Hecho en Espana" stuff. If you want to be comfortable, you can always go to any El Corte Ingles - their big chain of department stores for higher end stuff. They have an amazing grocery too where you can stock up on jamons and turrones and other Spanish food products to take home.

In the Fuencarral neighbourhood

Anyway, for this post and video, I'm focusing more on coming up with outfits for most of the items that I bought and it's not really going to be a haul video. I also just wanted to talk a little bit about shopping in Madrid in this blog post and also in the captions in the video - incase anyone was interested on what shopping in Spain and specifically in Madrid is like. Or if you are going to Madrid for the first time, then I hope you find this useful!

Check out the video below: