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Buying Clothes in Cairo
By Daniel Lanier
Instead of buying a handmade water pipe or a little leather
camel from the bazaar, both probably over-prized, many of my
friends who have visited me in Cairo, found themselves instead
laden with modern everyday clothes, business dresses or travel
wear from one of the countless boutiques here. They discovered
something unexpected: Beside the usual souvenir shops and bazaars
of all kinds, the whole of Cairo is a large shopping center for
modern, western-style clothes, too. Well done, I would say to my
friends, nice shirts or trousers do not get dusty, bulky and
boring at home – like water pipes and leather camels.
 Egypt, well known for its quality cotton, is now producing a
large range of clothes, for its own retail chains as well as for
famous international brands. Many of these clothes aren’t a
bargain, but often still cheaper than in Europe or America – if
you compare clothes of the same level of quality to each other. If
you decided to travel to Cairo, just wait for outfitting yourself
with a new set of clothes and buy it there!
But how and where to buy clothes in Cairo? At first, you should
know, what exactly you would like to have, expensive international
designer wear or modern Western-style middle-class clothing, cheap
Egyptian no-name products or high-quality Egyptian brands.
I would recommend to have a first look into some shops of
Egyptian clothing companies, which aren’t well known abroad, but
can easily compete with Western brands, in quality as well as in
design. Dalydress is one of these companies. It produces
and sells a wide range of fine leisure and business wear, for men,
women and children, from cotton, linen and other materials, and
features theme shops, for example, their nautical-inspired
clothes. The selection depends on the season and tends in
wintertime to consist more of pullovers and heavy trousers, for
example. Dalydress is especially famous for its men’s
shirts. Their clothes aren’t really cheap, suits start at around
1000 Egyptian Pound (260 US-$), but are often better quality than
what you would get for the same money, for example, in Europe.
 Concrete Clothes, another Egyptian brand, is a little
cheaper, but also of high quality. Its suits and other formal wear
are less classic in design than what you can find at Dalydress,
instead a little younger and more modern. Suits start at around LE
600 (160 $). At Safari, you will find a limited, but
well-selected choice of leisure and travel fashion from cotton and
linen, for men as well as for women and children. And: Safari
offers the only non-kitshy, tasteful t-shirts in town, which make
a good souvenir – with Egyptian comic-strips, including motifs
of the pyramids, the balloons written in English and Arabic at the
same time.
Young Egyptians, if their parents provide them with a little
more money than usual, buy their clothes at the World Trade Center
shopping mall, a three-story mall with a six-story annex next to
it. In particular, the part of the building which connects both
malls, hosts a lot of shops belonging to rising young Egyptian
designers.
 Egypt’s young middle-class is strolling through malls, too,
if they want to fit themselves out of new clothes. Especially
popular is the Ramsis Hilton Annex, and probably the majority of
the 500 shops of the newly inaugurated Arkadia Mall are shops for
leisure wear, too, with many international brands as for example Diesel
and Levi’s. Always a good address for buying clothes is
the whole area along and beside Ibrahim Al-Laqqany Street
(beginning from Roxy Square) and Al-Ahram Street in Heliopolis. A
countless number of glittering illuminated boutiques, especially
nice at night after sunset, and at the end, just where the Al-Ahram
Street meets a big church, is the glaring El-Horriyya Shopping
Mall, up to the roof full of clothing stores, seven floors. Here
you will find Benetton, Adidas, Ted Lapidus etc. and a
large number of shops selling Western-style no-name products –
not a bad choice for obtaining some good and modern everyday
clothes inexpensively.
For expensive international designer fashion, try the First
Mall in Giza with the elegant shops of Versace, Bvlgari or Aigner.
Or try outlets like the Egyptian branch of the international label,
Kookai in Mohandeseen. Well-known foreign brands, locally
produced in Egypt for export, can be found in shops like Brands
For Less.
SAFARI. World Trade Center, Corniche Al-Nil Nr.
1191, Bulaq, Cairo, next to the Hotel Conrad International. Daily
10 am to 10 pm. Another branch in the Nile Hilton Hotel at Tahrir
Square, downtown.
DALYDRESS. 41, Shehab St., Mohandessin, Cairo/Giza. Daily
11 am to 10 pm. Other branches throughout the whole city, as
for example in the Nile Hilton Annex, Tahrir Square, downtown.
WORLD TRADE CENTER (WTC). Corniche Al-Nil Nr. 1191, Bulaq,
Cairo, next to the Hotel Conrad International. Daily 10 am to 10
pm, some shops don’t open on Sunday.
Brands For Less. 90 Mohi El-Din Abu El-‘Ezz St.,
Mohandeseen, Cairo/Giza – or: 2 Taha Hussein St., Zamalek, Cairo
(in front of Yamama Shopping Center).
Kookai. 15, Syria St., Mohandeseen, Cairo/Giza.
First Mall. First Residence building, 35, Giza Street,
Giza, Cairo. Daily 10 am to 10 pm. In front of the Zoological
Garden.
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