Most of what people know about Plaza Frontenac this year comes from one headline: Saks Fifth Avenue is leaving. The Missouri Worker Adjustment and Retraining notice went out on March 6, laying off 65 employees as part of a nationwide round of Saks Global closures, and the store wound down by the end of May. That is the version of the story that made the news. It is not the version that changed the mall.
The cinema closed first, and it closed differently. Landmark's Plaza Frontenac Cinema shut its doors in February 2025, more than a year before Saks announced anything, after Brookfield Properties sued the operator for back rent. Six screens, built in 1998, run by Landmark for its entire run, gone quietly enough that most retail coverage of the plaza's 2026 turnover barely mentions it. For anyone who used the plaza the way it was built to be used, that closure did more to the place than the anchor departure that followed it.
What Actually Turned Over, and When
Six storefronts changed hands at Plaza Frontenac in roughly fifteen months, which is dense for a mall that has spent decades known for tenant stability. Working backward from today:
Aritzia opened its first Missouri location on June 4, 2026, taking about 10,000 square feet on the first floor. The Vancouver-based women's clothing chain has more than 140 stores across North America, and the nearest one before this was in Leawood, Kansas, roughly 20 miles south of Kansas City. That distance is the actual measure of how far the plaza still pulls shoppers from.
Abercrombie & Fitch moved into part of the second floor near the old Saks entrance, in space that used to belong to the cinema. Talbots relocated up from the first floor into a bigger footprint in the same area. Between the two of them, they filled the physical hole the Landmark closure left behind, just not with anything that plays movies.
Anthropologie's move predates all of this and explains the direction it was already headed. The store closed at St. Louis Galleria on February 9, 2025, and reopened at Plaza Frontenac on March 5, 2025, giving the region its only Anthropologie location. That was the plaza absorbing a competitor mall's departure a full year before the Saks news broke.
None of these are hypothetical. Every one has an opening date, a square footage, or a WARN filing behind it. What they add up to is a mall that has spent over a year in motion, and the Saks closure is the loudest chapter, not the only one.
The Direction the New Names Point
Look at what arrived versus what stayed put and a pattern shows up that the Saks headline doesn't capture on its own.
The names that have shown up recently, Aritzia, Golden Goose, Alo Yoga, Vuori, Lululemon, Kendra Scott, Tecovas, sit in a category retail analysts call accessible luxury. They are aspirational, well-made, and priced for a much wider buyer than the plaza's original 1974 concept, which was built to put Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue under one roof as one of only nine enclosed U.S. malls to pair those two anchors.
Meanwhile the full-luxury tier, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Tiffany & Co., David Yurman, Tory Burch, hasn't added a name in this entire stretch of turnover. Neiman Marcus continues on as the plaza's only department store anchor. No one has announced a second one. Brookfield has not floated a like-for-like luxury replacement for the Saks box, and as of now there isn't one on the record.
That composition, one department anchor with a lifestyle and accessible-luxury perimeter, is where most successful enclosed malls nationally have already landed over the past decade. Plaza Frontenac avoided that shift for years because its luxury draw was strong enough not to need it. The 2026 turnover is the year that resistance ended, at least on the tenant list.
The Habit the Turnover Didn't Replace
None of the new tenants sell a movie ticket, and that is the part of this story that actually touches daily routines rather than retail strategy.
The Plaza Frontenac Cinema wasn't a generic multiplex. It built its identity, and its regular audience, around independent and foreign-language film, the kind of programming that made it a recurring venue for the St. Louis International Film Festival. It sat next to Saks, inside a mall built around Fleming's, BrickTop's, and Brio Tuscan Grille at the outparcels, which is what made "dinner then a movie" a viable errand-free evening without leaving the property.
That loop broke in February 2025. The dinner half of it is all still there. The movie half isn't, and nothing that has moved into the plaza since, not Aritzia, not Abercrombie, not Talbots, replaces a screen. If a Tuesday night used to end at Plaza Frontenac, it now has to end somewhere else, and that shift happened well before most people started paying attention to what was going on with Saks.
The One Question Still Actually Open
Here is what makes this a story still in progress rather than a settled one: nobody has said what goes into the Saks box.
The building sits at 1701 S. Lindbergh, inside the city's Planned High Fashion Center district, and it is the only piece of this turnover that requires the city of Frontenac itself to weigh in. On September 22, the city's Planning & Zoning Commission took up an agenda item, listed as PZ0922-01, covering proposed exterior building and site changes tied to renovating the vacant Saks space. That is a real, dated, procedural step, not a rumor, and it means the decision about what that wing becomes is now running through a public municipal process rather than a corporate press release.
Part of why this is unresolved comes down to an ownership detail that doesn't usually matter for a mall anchor: persistent reporting since Saks closed has held that Saks owned its land and building outright rather than leasing from Brookfield, which is the opposite of how most anchor spaces work and gives the landlord less direct say over what happens next. Whether that resolves into a new department store, a subdivided multi-tenant buildout, or something else, is the open question shaping the next phase of the plaza's identity, and it is one that is still being worked out through actual city meetings rather than announced all at once.
Losing Saks does not undo two decades of grocery runs, school pickups, and country club drives that pass by the plaza on Lindbergh, and it does not touch the luxury core that has anchored the building since 1974. But the timing tells you something the headline alone doesn't: the loss residents actually felt first wasn't the one that made the news.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home near the plaza, or just want a straight read on how west county's retail shifts tend to play out over time, The Benes Group has been watching this corridor long enough to separate the noise from what actually changes a neighborhood.
