The Scottish Mail on Sunday - You
FAREWELL TO THE SHOP T
SLau ra Craiklooks aturday afternoon in Edinburgh, some time in the late 1980s. Three schoolgirls are huddled in the basement of Topshop on Princes Street, hotly debating its tube skirts. Jenni wants a pink one. Joanne wants it in black. I – ever keen to be different ( joke) – want the stripy version. But we only have a tenner, so we buy some hoop earrings instead. We exit happily, not too disappointed to miss out on new skirts because we have something better: inspiration, and the shared feeling that we’ve just spent an hour at the white-hot centre of the world.
That was the magic of Topshop in its heyday: it made you feel part of a club whose only membership criterion was that you loved fashion. As a teen, I thought the Edinburgh store was as exciting as shopping got. Then I clapped eyes on Topshop Oxford Circus.
The internet might have democratised fashion – anyone anywhere can buy a pair of Topshop jeans – but it can never replicate the heart-thumping joy of gliding down those escalators into 90,000 square feet of ‘It’ clothes and wondering whether you’d bump into Alexa Chung or Joan Collins (in my three decades as a Topshop customer, I saw both browsing the aisles). It lured you in, whether you were 18 or 80. And if you were Beyoncé, it smuggled you in after hours, via a secret entrance, to shop uninterrupted by the hordes.
Alas, Topshop Oxford Circus can no longer lure celebrities, time-pressed office workers, 40-something mums, starry-eyed tweens or eager tourists into its neon lair. On 1 February, online retailer Asos and realywent announced it had bought Topshop and Miss Selfridge in a £330 million deal, after parent company Arcadia collapsed into administration last year. As an ‘e-tailer’ founded on clicks rather than bricks, Asos declined to buy any of the brands’ remaining 70 stores, leaving 2,500 jobs at risk. But Topshop isn’t just another casualty of Covid. It’s also a casualty of fundamentally changed shopping habits, as well as greed, hubris and poor management that saddens anyone who worshipped at its altar or worked on its shop floor.
Founded in 1964 by Raymond Montague Burton, Topshop started humbly, in the basement of a store in Sheffield, and peaked as a billion-pound behemoth, with more than 500 stores in 37 countries. Its zenith and its nadir were both presided over by the disgraced Philip Green, who has been accused of racial, sexual and physical abuse, all of which he denied, and who in 2002 bought Arcadia in a £850 million deal.
Itwaspg(ashewas known to friends) who made Topshop a headline sponsor of London Fashion Week; who supported young British design talent by funding programmes like Newgen, which helps up-and-coming designers to show at London Fashion Week; who persuaded Kate Moss to design her first-ever collection; who masterminded capsule collections by Celia Birtwell, JW Anderson, Preen and Christopher Kane; who signed Beyoncé to launch her Ivy Park brand and who presided over Topshop’s decline into bankruptcy.
But this isn’t a tribute to PG. This is a tribute to Topshop: to the people who shopped there, the people who worked there and the army of women working tirelessly behind the man who grabbed the headlines. Philip Green
As Topshop closes its doors for the final time, fashion editor back at the store that transformed the high street our wardrobes – and asks, what wrong?
THE RIBBED VEST, 2001
They came in every colour, and were a snip at £4.99. Which was possibly why we wore them two at a time: white under pink, khaki under black. Extra points for protruding neon bra straps.