What it’s actually like
Most of the boutiques on Fifth Avenue buy their clothes. Carine designs them. The label belongs to Carine Wang, a certified master tailor, and the business is family owned and has been rooted in Scottsdale for more than twenty-five years. The shop at 7090 East Fifth Avenue, near the west end of the curve, opened in the fall of 2014 and was remodeled and expanded in 2019, so it is a bigger, brighter room than the address suggests.
The house style is easy to recognize from the sidewalk: saturated color, relaxed cuts and fabrics that move. Phoenix Magazine singled out the practical point that matters most to a visitor, which is that the clothes are made of a lightweight cotton and rayon blend that is breathable and does not need ironing. In a desert city where the summer high is a three-digit number and half the shoppers are flying home, that is not a small thing. These are clothes built to be worn in this climate and folded into a carry-on afterward.
The racks run the whole wardrobe: tops and tees, button-fronts and tanks, cardigans and light jackets, pants, skirts and skorts, dresses and matching sets. Because one designer is behind all of it, the pieces are made to go together, and the usual Carine customer leaves with a top and a bottom rather than a single item. It is a small local chain rather than a one-off boutique, with sister stores at Gainey Village, on Main Street, at La Mirada and in Sedona, but the Fifth Avenue store is one of its longest-running doors and it feels like part of the street.
What to buy
A matching set. The quickest way to understand the label, and the easiest outfit to pack. Wear the pieces together or split them across a week.
A dress in the brightest color you can stand. The house look, and the one that reads as Arizona without a cactus anywhere on it.
A cardigan or light jacket. Restaurant air conditioning in Scottsdale is fierce in summer, and a layer in the same fabric is the most-worn piece most people buy.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
Carine sits near the western end of the Fifth Avenue shops, a few doors from Sewell’s Indian Arts, the family-run Native jewelry dealer founded in 1932 and at its Fifth Avenue storefront since 1984. Street spaces on Fifth go fast; use the free public garage on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal or the Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard and walk. The Old Town on foot note maps the loop, and the Downtown & 5th Ave guide covers the district around it.
The store keeps daytime hours seven days a week, opening mid-morning and closing at six, with shorter hours on Sunday. Weekday mornings are the calm time for the fitting room. In high season, January through April, weekend afternoons on Fifth are busy with snowbirds and visitors, and Thursday’s ArtWalk on Marshall Way, a block east, brings an early-evening crowd onto the avenue. In summer, shop in the morning and take the bags back to the car before the heat peaks.
Two stores, one walk. The Main Street Carine opened in November 2017 a few minutes east across Scottsdale Road in the gallery district, so if you are doing both halves of downtown you can check stock at both.
Eat while you’re there
Cartel Roasting Co. on Fifth is the coffee stop, and Citizen Public House, a short walk along the curve, is the gastropub for lunch. Berdena’s is the tiny coffee bar for an early start, and FnB in Craftsman Court is the dinner reservation that makes the whole afternoon worth planning.
How it got here
Fifth Avenue was laid out in the early 1950s as the newly incorporated town’s shopping street, a curving lane of small storefronts west of Scottsdale Road meant to sell a western resort village to winter visitors. Resort clothing was part of that pitch from the start. The avenue’s early merchants sold what a visitor needed for a season in the sun, alongside the silver, weavings and pottery that the Kiva Craft Center and Craftsman Court made famous.
The street went through its quiet decades as downtown’s energy moved to Fashion Square and the Entertainment District, and by the 2010s it was rebuilding around independent shops and the restaurants clustered near Craftsman Court. Carine arrived in that rebuilding. The label already had a store at Gainey Village on Scottsdale Road, and in the fall of 2014 it opened at 7090 East Fifth Avenue, betting that the old resort-clothes street still had resort-clothes customers.
The bet paid. Carine opened a second downtown store on Main Street in November 2017, remodeled and expanded the Fifth Avenue shop in 2019, and kept growing into the 2020s with La Mirada in north Scottsdale in February 2021 and Sedona in March 2022, its first store outside the Scottsdale area. Through all of it the clothes have stayed designed in Scottsdale by the same tailor.
That continuity is what puts Carine in the Fifth Avenue tradition rather than outside it. The avenue was built for shops that made or chose what they sold, and a Scottsdale designer selling her own breathable, no-iron clothes to people who came here for the sun is about as close to the street’s original idea as a modern boutique gets.