Will this £400 dress revive Next?
As troubled High Street giant pins its hopes on a new designer collection . . .
As a nation we seem to have a profoundly personal connection with our clothing retailers. Far from seeing them as mere outlets for buying trousers and jumpers, we have an almost family relationship with them. their problems are our problems.
When BHs went under last year, it was a national bereavement. We worry about Jaeger as though it were an elderly aunt in distress, and Marks & spencer’s seemingly endless struggles to get their clothes right are always flagged in the news pages.
Last week it was next’s turn to cause us collective concern, announcing a dress priced at £399. What? we cried in unison. Four hundred quid for a dress from next?
it just didn’t seem appropriate for this member of the retail clan. it was like a usually sensible uncle cashing in his pension and buying a Ferrari.
For that level of financial investment you want a glamorous shopping experience. that satisfying swing of the carrier bag, the thrill of brand association. and glamour and thrills are not something i experience when i walk into my local next.
What i do feel is a profound sense of dislocation. What has this dismal array of clothes got to do with the brand that changed everything about fashion retail in the Eighties?
i’m not alone in my bewilderment — next’s profits were down 10per cent in the first half of the year, with a huge disparity between the shop and online arms of the business.
sales dropped in the shops by one third and City analysts have predicted that the retail giant — which three years ago outstripped Marks & spencer as our biggest national clothing retailer — will lose market share this year.
the reason we care — and why last week’s announcement made headlines — is because of what next used to mean to us midlifers when we were teens. it would be hard to convey to a Millennial, brought up on a diet of stylish clothes at knock-down prices that can be delivered overnight to her door, what a revelation next was when it launched.
the man behind it, George Davies, understood there was a desperate appetite among women all over Britain for high quality, well designed clothes.
WHEn they opened in 1982 the next shops were a revelation of fashionable clothes at reasonable prices. But it was next Directory six years later which launched the new shopping age. those same clothes available wherever you lived, via a catalogue as beautifully presented as a fashion magazine.
it was a hardback book of pictures by big-name photographers, with fabric swatches stuck to the pages. no wonder there are copies of the first one on sale at second-hand bookshop abebooks.co.uk for £40.
i remember going on holiday to Cornwall the year it launched and seeing a young woman coming out of the tiny post office clutching a next Directory box and beaming with excitement.
it would have been a long bus ride for that girl to have got to the shops, and even then she would have had little to choose from. it’s easy to forget how grim the British High street was back then.
after the brief seventies glory of Biba and Bus stop, all we had were the acrylic wastelands of Miss selfridge and Chelsea Girl. Which was why next was such a hit from the moment it opened. i remember swooning over Chanel-style tweed jackets and vowing i would shop there as soon as i had a job and money of my own — and i did.
But i can’t think when i last found anything to buy in my once-beloved next. so will the new initiative, which the £399 dress is part of, tempt me back? i’m surprised to say: Yes.
‘Label/Mix’, devised by next’s creative director Gemma Metheringham, is an online micro-boutique featuring mini collections by ten carefully selected emerging brands. and ‘emerging’ is the key word.
it’s a fresh take on the trend for High street chains to collaborate with mega designers, as pioneered by H&M in 2004 with Karl Lagerfeld.
Rather than bringing very well-known names down to the High street, Label/Mix takes small independent brands out to an audience which wouldn’t have heard of them.
that red lace dress is by a label called Whole9Yards, which won’t give you name boasting rights — but will definitely attract envious ‘who’s that by?’ enquiries. ordinary, it is not.
THE added value that the labels in the Label/Mix roster come with is insider knowledge. Which is how it can be a real fashion service to women, just as next Directory was in its day; bringing new designers to our doors, expanding our fashion consciousness from the comfort of our laptop.
i’m enamoured with the wool and cashmere roll neck by J.Won for £120, and a textured threequarter fake fur coat by teatum Jones at £275. i want to add Mimi Berry’s Grayson bag to my collection at £225.
none of it is cheap — £400 is still too much for me, and for most other women, for a short dress from next — but many of the stand-out pieces would add zing to a building-block wardrobe of chain store cheapies, and wouldn’t fall to bits.
so having given Label/Mix a thorough going-over i have reined in my outrage at next for its three-figure prices, because they are trying something new, which is worth a look.
Perhaps having made such an effort to source this product, they could inject some of this fresh spirit into those dismal shops? at the moment it’s available online only but a display of Label/Mix samples to examine before ordering would be a welcome distraction from the sea of viscose.
and then perhaps, having signed up for a delivery of that groovy sweater, i might be tempted to try on some simple black trousers to wear with it. and i will feel — finally — that next has come back into my fashion family fold.