Topshop sets stage for high street return – but can it go beyond nostalgia?

The Guardian

4 days ago

London fashion week begins in mid-September but showgoers will be starting early this season, with Topshop's first return to the catwalk in seven years taking place next weekend. Open to the public and likely to feature the campaign star Cara Delevingne, it's the latest evidence to confirm that the beloved high street brand is back.
Topshop, once a rite of passage for young women finding their style on the high street, was bought by Asos in 2021 when its parent company, Philip Green's Arcadia, went into administration. But its flagship store, the 90,000-sq-ft (8,400 sq metres) shopping destination at Oxford Circus in central London, closed later that year and the brand's relevance diminished. The Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, who bought a 75% stake in the company last year, is hoping to change that.
The prospect of Topshop's return in bricks and mortar has been greeted with glee by shoppers who remember its golden age in the 90s and 00s. Elle's contributing editor Laura Antonia Jordan says part of this is down to nostalgia for the Oxford Circus store, 'going down the escalators and potentially losing hours in there'. The Vogue fashion writer Olivia Allen expresses a similar sentiment. 'It was like an immersive amusement park for the teenage girl,' she says. 'The closest you could get to living inside a coming-of-age makeover movie.'
Allen, who describes herself as 'geriatric gen Z', says the store itself will be central to Topshop cementing its position with a new generation. 'It was a meeting point and the unspoken go-to for any trip to London,' she says. 'Without this, I'm not sure Topshop will ever have the same cachet.'
Michelle Wilson, the managing director of Asos, has confirmed that standalone stores are coming, telling Drapers in June: 'That's something that we are working on all the time.'
Topshop was founded in 1964 in Sheffield, catering to teenagers. A decade later, the first standalone store opened, and Topman was established in 1978. The Oxford Circus store opened in 1994.
Other triumphs included sellout fashion collaborations with designers including JW Anderson and Christopher Kane, as well as Kate Moss from 2007.
At its height, Topshop had 300 stores in the UK and 11 in the US. Part of this success was managed by Jane Shepherdson, its brand director from 1997 to 2007, who was often described as the most influential person on the high street.
Shepherdson says it was, in large part, down to the creative team behind the brand. 'We had a shared vision. What we wanted to do was to completely exceed and blow away our customers' expectations,' she says. 'Give them something that was so much better than they were expecting.'
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She mentions the collaborations and the now-classic shearling coats – 'something that Topshop wouldn't normally do' – as examples of this. 'An awful lot of it was done on instinct,' she adds.
Jordan says there is 'still a gap in the market for well-designed affordable clothes', something that the team behind Topshop are aware of. Speaking to the Sunday Times, Wilson distanced the brand from fast fashion and said prices were likely to be £50 for a pair of jeans and £100 for a dress. (Shein, by contrast, would charge about £18 and £19 respectively.) The brand comes under Asos's 'fashion with integrity' strategy, which monitors supply chains.
Catherine Shuttleworth, a retail consultant and the chief executive of Savvy Marketing, says this chimes with how younger customers are thinking. 'When they were 12 or 13 they were buying stuff from Pretty Little Thing, Boohoo,' she says. 'They're looking for a brand that reflects the life that they believe in, which is still Instagrammable but with more values, a bit more exclusive.'
Nostalgia for Topshop is particularly keenly felt by millennials and older members of gen Z, but the question remains how far this feeling can take the brand. 'I guess the dilemma for the new Topshop is: are you appealing to the millennial demographic for whom it was a real rite of passage or are you going after the version of us now?' says Jordan. 'I don't know if it can charm them in the same way because they are spoiled for choice.'