Topshop is launching a London pop-up next week ahead of its UK high street return

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

The Guardian

a day ago

The Guardian

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

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.' Sign up to Fashion Statement Style, with substance: what's really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved after newsletter promotion 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.'

The Guardian

2 days ago

The Guardian

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

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.' Sign up to Fashion Statement Style, with substance: what's really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved after newsletter promotion 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.'

Cara Delevingne on the new Topshop: ‘There's something for everyone'

Times

02-08-2025

Times

Cara Delevingne on the new Topshop: ‘There's something for everyone'

Riding the escalator down to the basement floor of Topshop's Oxford Circus branch was once a rite of passage for British teenagers. Fledgling trend hunters from across the country flocked to the hallowed rails of 214 Oxford Street, where identities were shaped, first loves were forged and an epic number of very (very) skinny jeans were purchased. At 32, the supermodel turned actress Cara Delevingne is just old enough to remember experiencing her own awakening at the now defunct store (an Ikea opened in its place earlier this year). 'You'd get off the escalator with a group of friends and Saturday would begin,' she tells me over the phone. 'I discovered my own sense of style among those rails. I'd look at something on the rack and I'd go, 'I don't really know if that's me but I'm going to try it.' It was there I learnt to take risks.' Topshop, which rises from the ashes at the end of this month with a new 2025 approach and, perhaps most crucially, a new owner (its former boss, the disgraced Philip Green, now most commonly spotted bobbing around on a superyacht in Monaco, is no longer involved), couldn't have chosen a more impassioned ambassador than Delevingne to lead its new era. The star, a regular in many of the catwalk shows that dominated its heyday era as well as the face of many an ad campaign, fronts the comeback campaign shot by Bartek Szmigulski, and has curated a collection of her favourite pieces. Among the highlights is an art deco black-and-white faux-shearling coat ('a statement piece you can wear with anything', Delevingne says) and the signature Jamie jeans ('I think it's time we brought back the skinny,' she adds). • Read more fashion advice and style inspiration from our experts 'It's all the things that I want in my wardrobe. Going from my twenties into my thirties, I wanted to kind of start dressing with a bit more thought. This collection lets me do that,' Delevingne says. 'You wear it with more Topshop or with vintage or other brands. Each piece stands out so much — there really is something for everyone.' Next year, the model, who has worked for some of the world's most prestigious fashion houses and starred in a handful of movies too, will continue her involvement in Topshop's great rehabilitation process, working on her own range with the brand. Snaring 'the super' is a statement of intent from Topshop, which is hoping that Delevingne's involvement in its comeback story makes fashion fans believe Topshop 2.0 is the real deal. 'Cara is original, she's creative and she's bold. Those are all the things that we want Topshop to be,' the retailer's managing director, Michelle Wilson, says. 'Authenticity is so important to us. We want to work with partners who genuinely love and care about the brand. Cara is absolutely that person.' Undoubtedly Topshop has its work cut out if it is to get even close to the glory days of high street domination, specifically 1998 to 2007 when, under the guidance of the brand director Jane Shepherdson (a legend in fashion circles), the chain was transformed into a globally recognised brand. The responsibility rests with the Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, the owner of Bestseller, who bought a 75 per cent stake in Topshop in 2024 (it had been owned by Asos since 2021, when the e-tailer bought it along with fellow Arcadia brands Topman and Miss Selfridge). Asos has kept a 25 per cent stake and continues to distribute the brand and host Topshop products online, while Bestseller (through its parent company) will distribute Topshop to its partners across the globe, making world domination a viable possibility. Under Povlsen's direction, Topshop now has its own design team, which, as Wilson puts it, 'is its own space to tell the brand's story and to show its collections in the way we want to show them'. • Will Topshop really return to the high street? Part of the strategy is tapping into the nostalgia of those who miss the real-life experience of Topshop. This includes a catwalk show — the brand's first in seven years — on August 16, with members of the public present and customers invited to 'shop' the collection immediately. There's also an appetite to collaborate with designers in the way Topshop did in its glory years, helping to bolster the careers of young British talent (see Christopher Kane, JW Anderson and Richard Nicoll) with collaborations and London Fashion Week support. 'We think there's still a huge gap in the market for working with designers in this way. Customers love it because they're getting to interact with up-and-coming design stars. And, of course, it is a great platform for the designers as well,' Wilson says. 'We're trying to pick all the positives of what Topshop was and then set it up for success in the current retail climate. Our big picture vision is to be the go-to accessible fashion brand for tastemakers and to bring the best of fashion to everyone.' Among the objectives for 'new' Topshop is that customers do not consider it a fast fashion retailer. The brand sits within Asos's Fashion with Integrity strategy (a means to monitor factory standards and supply chains), and the price points are purposefully not at the budget end of the scale — customers can expect to pay about £50 for jeans and up to a £100 for a dress; premium ranges are also expected. 'I think there are other players that have entered the market with very cheap products that are targeting that teenage group,' Wilson says. 'A real testament to our success is going to be if, in ten years' time, people are still wearing and talking about products that they bought during this relaunch period in the way they do previous Topshop collections.' • Topshop is back to woo Gen Z Delevingne, who has been holding on tight to that Kate Moss for Topshop floral minidress for more than a decade, had the same realisation when trying on the clothes for the shoot. 'Each piece is purposeful. What matters now is quality over quantity,' she says. Having got the chance to road-test the collection at Glastonbury in June, the model is also convinced of its versatility. 'I wore the pinstripe trousers with the faux-fur jacket and was so excited to tell people that they were part of the 'new' Topshop collection. 'You can dress these pieces up or down and wear them for everything from a meeting to going out to lunch to hanging out at home.' Top stuff.@

Topshop is launching a London pop-up next week ahead of its UK high street return

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

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

Cara Delevingne on the new Topshop: ‘There's something for everyone'

Topshop is launching a London pop-up next week ahead of its UK high street return

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

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

Cara Delevingne on the new Topshop: ‘There's something for everyone'

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