Now Topshop struts its stuff in Moscow
When Topshop became the first high-street store to show at London fashion week on the official schedule last September, it confirmed its climb from a cheap-chic haven for teenage girls to a high-fashion destination. It is the best friend of the wardrobe, dazzling yet dependable, for everyone from fashion foot soldiers to fashion editors, young mothers to Madonna. Now it is planning to take on the world.
Come October, builders permitting, Topshop will open its first store in Moscow, a tower of glass and steel in the European shopping mall just off the city centre. By then a Topshop “jeans bar” will be open in Barneys (the New York equivalent to Harvey Nichols), a shrine to the Baxter jean - the super-skinny style that has averaged UK sales of 18,000 a week since its release last August, and which is shrinkwrapping the legs of women up and down the country. Eight looks from the higher priced Topshop Unique line will be selling from the supremely fashionable 10 Corso Como Comme des Garcons store in Tokyo. Given that Philip Green, owner of the Arcadia retail group, has recently been spotted in New York looking for sites for a flagship store, this looks for all the world like a bullish expansion policy.”Oh dear,” says Jane Shepherdson, Topshop’s brand manager. “I am generally nervous about Topshop abroad. I don’t think for one minute it’s an easy or obvious thing to do. Everyone else seems to think it is, but I don’t. I don’t see Topshop as an H&M, for example, which is everywhere.” What makes the difference, she says, is that Topshop is “quite British, and British people are more interested in fashion for the sake of it, as opposed to fashion to make you look sexy or pretty”.
Nothing summarises this approach as well as the “Kate Moss” vest, a round-necked top that somehow contrives to offer exactly the right gradient of strap for £6, and which owes its nickname to the supermodel’s predilection for it. Available in 15 colours (and a perfect fit with those Baxter jeans), it epitomises Topshop’s encouragement in its shoppers of experimentation: the point of a vest that looks, en masse, like a uniform is that you have to make it your own.
Shepherdson may be worried, but in Moscow, where the Topshop team reported sightings of window displays in which many a wonky wig sat askew an disspirited mannequin, that kind of idiosyncratic experimentation could be exactly what will make the store work.
Aliona Doletskaya has been editor of Russian Vogue for eight years and has seen “huge changes” in that time. “What does the arrival of Topshop say about Moscow? It says that people are getting more sophisticated, funnily enough. They are getting - how shall I say? - more entrepreneurial. I can go to Topshop and I can find something I really love, and I can style it as I wish. It turns the shopper into an entrepreneur; it opens up creativity. It will bring entrepreneurial fashion.
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