Walk into Hunza G’s new Marylebone space and it feels like the first proper day of summer. The walls are washed in a soft baby blue, the floor glows a warm, sunny yellow, and a big glossy pink inflatable dolphin floats overhead as though it drifted in off a holiday pool. The space is called Under the Water, and for a brand people have adored for years, it is something quietly momentous. This is the first home Hunza G has ever had.
That is the part worth slowing down for. Hunza G is a cult label in the truest sense, the one-size swimsuit you first hear about from a friend, the suit that somehow flatters everyone, passed along by word of mouth and worn by a roll call of famous names since the 1980s. For most of its life it has lived online and on bodies, beloved but without a shop to call its own. A first physical space, in the city where the brand began, is a real statement, and Hunza G has chosen to make it a joyful one.
The room earns its name. A rippled mirrored surface catches and bends the light the way it moves across water, and the whole space is built to hold the easy feeling of a day at the beach. The swimsuits hang in soft, glowing alcoves in the full Hunza G spectrum, from the bright primaries to the retro colour-block tones the label loves, each piece shown like the cheerful little thing it is. Chrome mannequin heads wear the brand’s swim caps along the walls. Nothing is precious or hushed. The mood is sunshine, colour and ease, the exact spirit Hunza G has always sold, now turned into a place you can stand inside.
It helps enormously that the space was designed by Studio Boum, the studio behind the staged worlds of Loewe, Ganni, Rhode and Hermès. That a cult swimwear label is working with a team of that calibre on its very first store says a great deal about how the rules have changed. A debut shop is no longer a stockroom with a till and a neat stack of product. It is an experience, art-directed and emotional, built to make you feel something the moment you walk in, long before you reach for anything to buy.
Georgiana Huddart, who founded the label and shaped the concept herself, said she wanted the space to feel like stepping into the world of Hunza G, not simply shopping it, a place for the community to experience the brand in person, in summer, in the city. That is exactly what it does. You come in for the feeling, and the swimwear comes with it. There is even a small run of pieces and keepsakes made for the space, the kind of thing a devoted community turns up early for, because part of the joy of a first home is being there at the start.
There is a reason this approach keeps working. A brand like Hunza G has spent years building something rarer than sales, which is genuine affection, and a first store is where that affection finally gets a place to gather. Give people a room that feels like the brand at its best and you turn customers into visitors, and visitors into the kind of fans who bring a friend along next time. The product was never really the whole point. The feeling was, and now it has an address.
Hunza G’s feeling has always been summer, colour and the easy confidence of a suit that fits whoever puts it on. Under the Water takes all of that and makes it three-dimensional, a sunlit blue room with a pink dolphin keeping watch over it, open just in time for the season the brand has always belonged to. We did not want to leave, which is rather the point.
