To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?. Lucy Siegle
the rather pedestrian high-street staple BHS, Green bought the Arcadia group for £850 million37 in 2002. It was widely agreed that he had pulled off the bargain of the century: netting Arcadia gave him Topshop, Topman, Wallis, Evans, Miss Selfridge and Dorothy Perkins, and therefore a significant slice of the British high street. But while all of those were much-loved brands, they weren’t exactly setting closets on fire. That was about to change.
Within a few months Green was rarely mentioned in the media without the attendant cliché that he possessed the Midas touch. Topshop had achieved something extraordinary. In financial terms it accounted for £1 billion of UK clothing sales by the first half of 2005 alone (bear in mind that the entire clothing market was only worth £7 billion). Green’s apparent ability to turn these humdrum stores into cash cows that made the British high street the envy of the world was celebrated by business analysts, the fashion press, and especially consumers. Topshop became a destination point for anybody who was interested in fashion. For us consumers it was a straightforward process. You simply turned to the pages in magazines that prescribed how to ‘get the look’ from international runways, and popped into your nearest Topshop to find affordable pieces that took their cue from the design trends on the rail. Admittedly the cut, the finish and the fabrics would have given a modellista (a handicraft professional working in the luxury industry) a nervous breakdown, but they were immediate and cheap facsimiles.
I wouldn’t like to suggest that I was in any way above this. I was as punchdrunk on the formula as everyone else. My allegiance actually predated Green’s transformation, as I shopped pretty religiously in Topshop Oxford Circus from 1992 when I arrived in London as a seventeen-year-old university student. I still have a few things from that era: strange Lycra flared leggings and cropped tops – oh dear. My visits began to tail off from early 2000 as I became increasingly worried about Arcadia’s sourcing policies and its failure to join the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) – at the time of writing, Arcadia is still not a member. There was also the fact that I had begun to feel a bit too old, and instinctively wanted a better cut. By the time I bagged a ticket for the front row at the Topshop show in 2009 I was already researching this book, and the magic bubble had burst for me.
But not, it seemed, for the rest of the style press. At London Fashion Week in February 2009, Topshop’s status remained undiminished. By that point, indeed, it had become the most exciting thing about London Fashion Week – a statement that I think would be hotly denied by the British Fashion Council – bolstered by the fact that this spring/summer 2010 season was the sixteenth time Topshop had sponsored New Gen (New Generation, or up-and-coming talent. When you think the alumni of New Gen include Matthew Williamson, Christopher Kane, Erdem, Jonathan Saunders and the late Alexander McQueen, the excitement by association is understandable). Besides, Topshop’s mainline show has a reputation for ‘delivering’. All of which explained why, even on a Sunday, the great and the good of fashion had faithfully traipsed to a warehouse in Kensington.
Once I had negotiated the many doormen (there was a high security presence, for reasons that were never entirely clear) I too was quickly transported. The Topshop show was every bit the theatrical masterpiece I had been told about. A runway with a surface like silver ice and a backdrop of neon and glitter strips. A bank of photographers at its end assembled in what looked like a precarious vertical pyramid. The legions of fashion editors and stylists, all clad in black, determinedly flooded the place like stormtroopers, albeit ones with purple Moët et Chandon notebooks and outsized leather bags. It went dark. It went very dark. And then we were off : a relentless stream of neon- and glitter-clad teenagers, like glowing tadpoles on the silver runway. Every three or four girls a new motif or accessory was introduced: a clutch bag, a raft of bangles, a scarf. All bang on trend, all fun and uncomplicated. This was fast fashion on the move, and it was deeply seductive. When the audience showed its appreciation with sustained applause it sounded almost grateful. It was a moment of dazzling frippery at a time when the nation was plunging into a dark recession.
I imagine it was even more exciting four years before, when Topshop had its first proper London Fashion Week show, because you can say what you like about this high-street giant, there’s no denying it brought some excitement to a rather dull set-up. Much of that ‘Midas touch’ was actually applied by Jane Shepherdson, who was at the helm of Topshop in 2005, when the flagship Oxford Circus shop’s sales exceeded £100 million38 in a single year in the midst of a consumer downturn, and the chain would sell out of 5,500 sequin vests in half a week.
Shepherdson had a fabled way with style, managing to pick the trends that she knew would be lapped up and getting them instore at just the right time. By 2005 she had twenty years’ experience at Topshop, beginning as a buyer who had allegedly earned her sartorial stripes by staking her whole career on a job lot of tank tops39 that became one of the store’s biggest hits.
‘A lot of the time these days I actually feel much happier when I go through my existing wardrobe, wearing some of the clothes I’ve kept for a long time and looking different precisely because I’m not wearing the latest thing,’ says the Jane Shepherdson of 2010. ‘When you slip into wearing the trend of the hour, maybe that’s the easy thing to do.’ She laughs. ‘Even though of course I’m sitting here in a camel cashmere jumper, which is apparently the trend.’ The woman who is credited with engineering Topshop’s supreme reign in fast fashion is now head of Whistles, having engineered a management buyout in 2010. She can also frequently be heard expressing sentiments about fashion that have more in common with the ethical fashion movement than the mainstream. For example, she is on record as saying that rich people buying cheap clothes and bragging about it is ‘very vulgar40’, a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree. Like me, she appears to have reached saturation point with ‘fast fashion’. She’s had her fill of insubstantial pieces and the endless churn. ‘I know!41’ she says. ‘And I’m in fashion.’ ‘Jane,’ I venture rather timidly, ‘do you ever feel like you created the monster?’ Her expression is a cross between remorse and bemusement. ‘I do get asked this. On one hand it’s ludicrous, because I didn’t invent fast fashion at all. If I had done, surely I’d be a millionaire by now, and I am definitely not that. Our motives were pretty simple. All we were trying constantly to do was to create the best possible design for the price that we were committed to – one that was affordable to our customer base. We thought at the time, well, we’re selling lots of stuff , but let’s make stuff that at least has some design integrity and make it interesting and exciting. That’s what we did.’
There’s no doubt that that simple aspiration to imbue clothes with ‘some design integrity’ worked. As Shepherdson acknowledges, ‘When I joined Topshop a real fashionista would not have been seen in it. It wasn’t the thing to do. It was a different ethos. You wore designer or you wore high street.’ She certainly changed that. It became de rigueur to shop on the high street again. ‘Every girl admits to shopping at Topshop,’ wrote business journalist Nick Mathiason, profiling Shepherdson in the Observer in 2005. ‘Inevitably you end up creating trends,’ Shepherdson says, ‘and of course people think they have to have them. It becomes quite hard to pinpoint where it all started.’
Following the indisputable success of Jane Shepherdson’s strategy came a raft of retailers who were determined to emulate Topshop’s success, and indeed take it further. Fast fashion became an industry standard, and clothes were produced in smaller production batches and at dizzying rates. High-street fashion was on high alert to every trend and consumer whim, defined by the industry as ‘quick response’.
Emulating the Topshop magic meant getting the quickest supply chains possible. In industry terms this meant decreasing production times. Staff responsible for buying and sourcing went into overdrive. To compete they needed to react urgently to any change in trend. Every part of the production cycle was squeezed, concertinaed into days and hours rather than weeks. ‘Time to market’ (the all-important period in which factories sew garments to meet orders and then deliver them to the stores) was halved, then quartered. There