Ask any Sydneysider of a certain age and they’ll still light up at the name Mark Foy’s. Many stories shared will tell you about the morning in 1909 when the hydraulic escalators (the first in Australia) carried wide-eyed shoppers from floor to floor inside the new Piazza.
Drawing architectural inspiration from the French Second Empire (with its mansard roofs and towers) and Federation Anglo-Dutch, while its layout and shopfronts recall Parisian department stores like Le Bon Marché.
Memories recall the rooftop garden restaurant, the in-house post office, the ballroom that hosted debutante balls and the vast millinery salon where Elizabeth Tweedie Foy (the family’s legendary couturière) personally fitted hats for Dame Nellie Melba.
Ask around among Sydneysiders of a certain vintage, and they will share stories of the 1920s, when Mark Foy’s bought the Target Woollen Mills in Marrickville so they could weave their own signature tweeds and suitings. About the full-colour illustrated catalogues that landed in letterboxes from Broome to Bluff, long before colour printing was common anywhere else in the country.
About the 1930s “Foy’s Fairs”, twice-yearly spectacles that drew 100,000 people in a single week, complete with orchestras, fashion parades and free ferry tickets for interstate visitors.
About 1948, when Pierre Balmain flew in to present his collection, followed by Elsa Schiaparelli in shocking pink. And most of all, about February 1951, when Christian Dior granted Mark Foy’s the unimaginable honour of first previewing the new-look Dior (never before permitted outside Paris) modelled in the Piazza’s fifth-floor salon while Sydney society gasped and applauded.
They’ll remember the French mannequin parades of the 1950s: real Paris models flown in twice a year, stepping off taxis onto Pitt Street in full couture while traffic literally stopped and crowds ten deep cheered.
Then, in 1983, the doors closed. The chandeliers were sold, the marble was covered and a generation grew up only knowing the stories.
Until now.
In 2026, over 140 years after Francis and Mark Foy opened their small Oxford Street drapery, the name on the brass plate is lit again.
Only this time it’s mark-foys.com: a digital boutique carrying the same uncompromising standard. Giving you access to top collections of designer brands, their seasonal bests, unmissable pieces at up to 70% off. Limited releases, no endless waitlists; delivered to your door in days. From Celine to Jacquemus, Saint Laurent, Valentino Garavani and more
The escalators are gone. The rooftop orchestra has fallen silent.
Sydney’s most beloved store never really left. It was just waiting for the right century to come home.
Mark Foy’s. Styling Your World Since 1885.
