Topshop relaunch: will it be today's teen dream like it was for my generation?

Telegraph

a day ago

Topshop's seven-year absence from the runway – and teenage hearts – was brought to an end on Saturday with a comeback show in Trafalgar Square.
The stardust was there as before: supermodel Cara Delevingne attended, having hand-picked 40 pieces from a new autumn/winter 2025 collection. Skinny jeans, and accompanying nostalgia, were also in full effect.
The show featured a preview of pieces set to drop later in the season, which would once have sent a buzz of excitement rippling through crowds of teenage girls and ascending all the way to the fashion elite.
Today? Well, it's complicated.
Almost five years after its then parent company, Sir Philip Green's Arcadia, collapsed into administration, new standalone stores are promised too, though no date has yet been given for the brand's bricks and mortar return.
All of which news may prompt still more wistfulness among what used to be its target audience. Because, for a large cohort of British women, Topshop is all about the memories.
If you happened to be young and female in the Nineties or first half of the Noughties, Topshop almost certainly formed a backdrop to at least some part of your life.
Its centrepiece was that palace of dreams that the flagship Oxford Circus branch represented. For young, excitable shoppers brimming with optimism, enjoying their first adolescent independence and a little bit of cash, descending the escalators into the extensive bowels of the store meant entering a world where you could be magicked into a better, more fashionable version of yourself.
'As someone growing up in a small town, the Oxford Circus Topshop was the holy grail of cool,' recalls one 40-something-year-old friend. 'A fountain of possibility, it was always where we gravitated to.'
For those of us raised in the North of England, like me, it wasn't quite the same. Model agency scouts did not, to my knowledge, frequent the main Leeds city centre branch where I browsed on Saturdays during my teens – only 30-odd miles to the north of where the brand started its life in the basement of a Sheffield store in 1964. Kate Moss never stood in the window in Leeds as she did in the Oxford Circus branch in 2007, to launch her first Topshop collection.
Yet even for those of us coming of age in the provinces, our local Topshop was still a destination and not merely a shop. It wasn't like going to BHS or M&S with your mum to choose a suitable jumper or school skirt. It was where you went when you were old enough to take a bus into town with your friends (in my case, I had just turned 12) and enjoy an afternoon of heady, unchaperoned freedom.
As I grew older and taller, the best thing about Topshop was its thoughtful Tall section, to my mind the true unsung hero of the brand. Here, as in few other stores, I could finally find jeans that were long enough and yet simultaneously fashionable.
If daydreams of self-transformation lie at the heart of the experience of the teenage girl or young woman, then Topshop knew how to tap into this better than anyone. It did so by straddling various apparent divides, with an offer that was at once affordable and aspirational; associating itself with the likes of Moss and Beyoncé (whose Topshop line crashed the store's website in 2016) but also being very much high street rather than haute couture.
'Topshop is one of those brands that maintains a cachet across shoppers who really remember it and have such strong memories of it not just as a shop but also as a rite of passage and part of an exciting stage of their life, and shoppers who have never ever shopped there but are romanced by stories of the past,' says retail analyst Catherine Shuttleworth, the chief executive and founder of marketing agency Savvy.
If it captured the cultural zeitgeist in the late Nineties and Noughties, just as Biba did in the Swinging Sixties, this owed much to the vision of Jane Shepherdson, its brand director from 1998 to 2007. During her tenure, annual profits jumped from £9 million to £100 million.
Although Topshop had established itself as a standalone store by the mid-1970s, it wasn't until 1994 – following two decades of growth – that its flagship store opened on Oxford Street in London.
Spread over three floors and 90,000 square feet, it boasted not only clothes – rails and rails of them, as far as the eye could see – but a nail bar and DJ booth.
In 1997, the Burton group to which it belonged, restructured into the Arcadia group, which was bought for £850 million by Sir Philip Green in 2002.
During Topshop's Noughties heyday, the retail magnate could be spotted with Moss and American Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour in the front row at London Fashion Week. But the future held a fall for both Sir Philip and, to a lesser extent, Topshop.
In 2018, Sir Philip was named in the House of Lords by Labour peer Lord Hain as the businessman who had an injunction to prevent him from being identified in relation to MeToo allegations revealed by The Telegraph – allegations which Green 'categorically and wholly' denied. His Arcadia group collapsed in 2020, during the pandemic. All of Topshop's stores shut not long afterwards.
The following year, the brand was bought by the online-only fashion retailer Asos, which has continued to sell Topshop items.
Half a decade later, remembrance of chain stores past – and for what they said about how we lived – remains irresistible. Can Topshop recapture its glory days?
'I was a mad Topshop fan in the Nineties but I probably wouldn't shop there now because my idea of what I want out of fashion has changed,' says one fashion insider. 'I'm not partying any more. I want things for work. I want to be sustainable.'
Many like her now turn to Vinted to seek out second-hand bargains online, while click-happy, quick-scrolling younger shoppers look to the fast fashion likes of Shein and PrettyLittleThing.
'The landscape has changed and Topshop doesn't really fit into it,' says the insider.
Shuttleworth is more optimistic. 'The great news for Toshop is that we are still talking about it,' she says. 'The question of course will be can likes turn into sales? It would appear that if the current level of excitement can be converted, Topshop will have a bright future.'
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