The fashion firm where girls just wanna have fun -- and lose £26m
The whole thing is just a big laugh, of course. If I don’t get that, it’s because I’m a stale old chauvinist who can’t bear to see young women running a business and having lots of fun at the same time.
envy, that’s all it is. Still, there’s a few things I wish the makers of Inside Missguided: Made In Manchester ( C4) would ask eleanore, Treasure and the rest of the girls at the Manchester head office of the fast fashion brand.
Like, why don’t we ever see the factories where Missguided’s disposable clothes are made? Are your workers paid a living wage? how old are the youngest, and how many hours do they work?
Like, do you ever even ask yourselves those questions?
‘Like’ seems to be your favourite word, whether you’re talking or ‘liking’ things on social media. So, like, is it a problem that the plastics and manmade fibres in those ultracheap tops and skirts you urge teenage customers to wear and throw away will end up in landfill, because they can never be recycled?
Like, do you care? I mean, like actually give it a thought? Or are you all too busy ‘ making a difference’, ‘fighting the cause’, ‘being uniquely you’?
eleanore, who is senior brand manager — whatever that means
— has the answer. She and her senior creative and campaign manager, Treasure, ‘have so much fun and just make each other laugh’. That’s all right then.
‘Being uniquely you’ seems to mean turning up for work with a hangover and throwing stilted swearwords into every conversation. It’s as though the girls are reading them off cue cards — they sound as fake as their clothes.
This week’s episode followed a flying day trip to Ibiza, to raid the pool-side shops for styles to copy. Then the company’s owner, Nitin Passi, staged a ‘disruptive guerrilla marketing campaign’ by giving his Rolls-Royce a pink wrap.
‘No one else has done it before,’ gasped a 21-year-old ‘social media executive’ called Cassie — apparently oblivious to the fact Nitin did exactly the same thing the previous year with his Lamborghini.
The voiceover is keen to emphasise how much pressure these bold young women face: in 2018 their company lost £26 million. What we’re not told, because the documentary team forgot to find out, is whether they’re now back in profit, or anywhere near it. Perhaps profit only matters to fuddy- duddies. What ‘ makes a difference’ now is getting 100,000 ‘views’ on social media.
To this end, the girls are ‘tearing up the rulebook’ with a promo ad featuring models on a yacht. You might think it looks like a Duran Duran video from 1982, but you’ve never lost £26 million so what do you know?
It’s only money. Poor Marian lost something infinitely more important, when she came back to her house in Gloucestershire one afternoon to discover her husband John, 79, was missing.
Retired aerospace expert John was once a manager at Bae in Bristol, part of the team behind Concorde. But dementia has robbed him of his outstanding mind. he’d gone for a walk in his slippers, and Marian was afraid he’d never find his way home.
Reported Missing ( BBC1) charted the herculean efforts of police, who searched well into the night before they found him. It turned out that John had been happily watching their eye-inthe-sky helicopter, never dreaming it could be looking for him.
Marian’s flood of mixed emotions after getting her husband home safely was wholly understandable. ‘I think she wants to give him a big kiss,’ said their tearful daughter, ‘and then kill him!’