Topshop's decline marks the end of the high street's golden age
2018 was not a vintage year for fashion. The crisis-hit House of Fraser and an embattled Marks & Spencer made headlines, as did a rising tally of planned store closures, and accompanying job losses, deemed necessary in a turnaround plan for New Look. The Orla Kiely brand, famed for its geometric prints, went into liquidation in September, while Dolce & Gabbana ends the year under serious pressure, having been dropped by important retailers after a racism scandal shipwrecked a fashion show planned in China.
But the most significant downfall to impact on the culture of fashion is that of a store still very much open for business. The undoing of Philip Green, and by association Topshop, is a watershed moment for British high street fashion.
Hit by multiple accusations of bullying and sexual harassment, Green was further humiliated by being dropped by as a business partner by Beyoncé, who cut ties between her Ivy Park athleisure brand and Topshop after the allegations. The launch event for Topshop’s keynote partywear collection this season, a collaboration with the up and coming designer Michael Halpern, was cancelled at the last moment. There will be no star-studded parties celebrating Topshop’s place at the centre of the British fashion ecosystem this year, for the simple reason that it can no longer lay claim to that position.
Topshop was facing problems before the claims surrounding Green. All along the high street, an existing decline began to steepen in 2018. Turnover in 2017 at Arcadia Group, the umbrella for smaller brands such as Dorothy Perkins and Burton as well as flagships Topshop and Topman, had already fallen by £113m, or 5.6%, on that of the previous year.
This decade has seen the young shoppers who are Topshop’s key market moving from bricks-and-mortar shopping, a field in which Topshop was dominant, to online, in which it faced stiff competition from new and nimble, social media-savvy, pricecompetitive brands such as Boohoo and Missguided. Furthermore, the BHS pension scandal of 2016 had cut into the personal fortune of Green and his wife, Tina, and forced him to step back from the limelight.
The Topshop catwalk shows at which Green would position himself centre-stage, once a biannual sight at London fashion week, have been consigned to history. In his pomp, Green gave himself the prime paparazzi spot each season: next to Kendall Jenner in February 2014, Cara Delevingne in February 2015, Anna Wintour in September 2015, and Kate Moss in September 2017.
In 2018, however, there were no Topshop catwalk shows at London fashion week. The programme of sponsoring catwalks for emerging designers, along with the lavish champagne-soaked hospitality that became a symbol of Green’s status, was already being pegged back by the beginning of this year.
While few tears have been shed for Green, the decline of Topshop illustrates another shift in fashion: the end of a golden age of the high street. From the early 00s to the beginning of this decade, Topshop was the poster child for a fashion culture in which glamour and newness were democratised and made available to shoppers on a mass budget for the first time. Catwalk images had previously been a closely guarded secret in the months during which clothes shown at fashion week went into production, which meant high street retailers operated on a sixmonth time lag, unable to begin work on high street versions of the “new look” until the designer clothes went on sale.
The internet changed all that. Images became immediately available, enabling savvy high street teams to interpret the trends and deliver them to suit their customers just as fast as Bond Street. Topshop – thanks to a talented and largely female team led by Jane Shepherdson – exploited this opportunity better than anyone else, delivering up to the minute, well-priced fashion.
Green’s heavily stage-managed front row photo opportunities signified more than just the roarings of his rampant ego. Having Vogue cover girls attend a Topshop fashion show reflected a time when fashion’s class system appeared to have melted away.
It was not to last. The latest hemlines, as decreed by the most chic designers in Paris or the colour-dominating catwalks in Milan, had once been thrilling plot twists that kept fashion customers hooked. Now that all of fashion’s secrets were out in the open, these plot twists – otherwise known as trends – lost their power over women’s shopping habits.
Topshop’s cachet had been based on being the closest a high street shopper could get to catwalk fashion. But in making it accessible to all, Topshop helped devalue the currency of biannual trends, and the audience ebbed away to find excitement elsewhere – in street style, streetwear, or Instagram, in a new generation of social mediaoriented brands.
At the same time, a growing awareness of the conditions of workers producing fast fashion and of the environmental impact of throwaway styles dimmed the lustre of fashion as a playground for all. The current crisis has been brought about by a man of whom few are fond, but in its pomp Topshop was a shop millions of women adored.