How could anyone believe M&S labels had an identity to lose?
‘Losing its identity,” is an evocative phrase when it crops up in the Shipping Forecast. Less so, if you are part of the team wrangling that notoriously intractable beast, M&S womenswear. Scarcely a season passes without some bold statement about the company’s plans to conquer the womenswear Jabberwock – most recently, its announcement that the Per Una, Autograph and Limited Edition ranges have “lost their identity”.
The mystery is how anyone at M&S believed these labels had an identity that their customers would care to embrace. Who, I have always wondered, was the woman who examined the Grayson Perry glitter and frill at Per Una, the boxy blandness of Autograph, or Limited Edition’s sad knock-offs of high-fashion looks and found her best self reflected there?
If M&S clothes were always this awful, we could just not shop there. But it has rare flashes of brilliance that keep the flame of hope alive. Some years ago, people used to ask where I got a pair of rose-printed suede ankle boots. Last season a teal velvet anorak had the same effect. But a recent visit revealed a wasteland of cruel pastels.
I have a theory that the only way to shop for clothes at M&S is to pop in for some dull necessity – a vest, or some socks – whereupon a hidden treasure will occasionally reveal itself.
Making your customers embark on a quest for the One Good Thing concealed, like the Holy Grail, in each season’s collections, is an identity of sorts – but a tricky one on which to build a thriving business.
Stephen Spender celebrated the gaunt beauty of electricity pylons in a poem comparing them to “nude, giant girls”. But where is the laureate for Britain’s gasholders – those beautiful structures, doomed by the inexorable advance of new development? Henry Blofeld, most poetic of cricket commentators, mourns the decision by Lambeth Council to rebuild as a block of flats the 140-year-old gasholder that overlooks the Oval cricket ground. In East Greenwich, where I live, a beloved landmark, the Victorian gasholder at the entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel, is scheduled for demolition. In an ineffable example of corporate doublethink, its owners, SGN, announced that, “As part of our dismantling programme, we are committed to celebrating... the history of our gasholders”.
We have learned nothing from the municipal vandalism of the 1960s that destroyed the hearts of our cities and market towns.
Just as we condemn the philistinism of those Sixties planners, our grandchildren will marvel at our selfish disregard of our Victorian industrial heritage.
Laura Harper-hinton, co-organiser of the Fork to Fork food festival, thinks that “schools should ban puddings”. If you wonder why we have an epidemic of food disorders to go with our obesity epidemic, you’ll find the reason in that priggish statement. Demonising food is not just joyless, but noxious. Jelly and ice cream have the same place in a balanced diet as the “meatballs, quinoa, spinach and carrot” that Harperhinton prepares for her son’s school lunches.
The secret of healthy eating is not a secret at all: regular meals, mostly homemade; a minimum of snacks, and a diet that is a pleasure, not a quino a infested, pudding-free penance.