The End of an Era

4 minute read time

If you were a fashion obsessive in the early noughties like me, there was only one landmark on your London tourist trail, and that was Topshop at Oxford Circus, the high-street behemoth’s London flagship store. At a whopping 90,000 sq ft – that’s five and a half times bigger than the brand’s principal Irish premises on St Stephen’s Green – and filled with everything from catwalk-inspired fashion and vintage finds to brow bars and juice joints, it represented everything that I loved about London – like the city itself, it was diverse, eclectic, and full of possibilities.

Both the city and the store defined my 20s, and those memories are as treasured as childhood Christmases, so when I learned that the Oxford Circus store was no more since online retailer Asos bought out part of the Arcadia empire, I felt as nostalgic for the steep escalators that transported me down into that basement of sartorial ambition as I did about entering Santa’s Grotto in Switzers as a child.

I was lucky enough to live in London for seven years during my 20s, and it was a wonderful time to be there working in publishing. There was no social media and no internet to speak of, magazines sold in their hundreds of thousands each month, jobs were secure and shopping was a perfectly acceptable pastime. There were no moral questions around buying a new top just for a Saturday night out. Fast fashion was not a Pandora’s Box of ethical uncertainties. It was fun, and stores like Topshop were seen as the democratisers of style. Anybody with a good eye could look like a fashion player because Topshop was churning out catwalk-inspired clothes at Camden market prices.

While the brand began by offering young women like me on-trend items at cut-price offerings, it very soon became the hunting ground of London’s elite. Under the brand direction of Jane Shepherdsen, throwaway threads were elevated to design classics and women of means recognised this as quickly as style-savvy teens. From the Spice Girls to IT girls like Alexa Chung, in the noughties, everybody wore Topshop. To work just five minutes from the Oxford Circus store, as I did, was as exciting to me as Krispy Kreme is to Homer Simpson. I didn’t need to eat on my lunch breaks, because as Carrie Bradshaw said of Vogue, a trip to Topshop fed me more.

Setting foot in that store as a wide-eyed ingenue, I felt exactly as Colin did on walking into “the pink palace” for the first time in Channel 4’s It’s A Sin – awakened. There was simply nothing like this in Dublin. In the late nineties, our high street was at a pretty low ebb. Oasis, Warehouse, Benetton, a tiny Topshop concession in the Jervis Street Centre...there was little to stimulate the sartorial imagination. But at Oxford Circus, there stood a shrine to fashion, and we worshipped at every opportunity.

But it wasn’t just about the clothes. Topshop at Oxford Circus offered experiential retail long before the phrase was coined and the idea was harnessed across luxury and high-street brands years later.

The DJ, the pumping tunes, the video screens, the uber-cool sales assistants, the model scouts who frequently set up shop in the store...there was a party atmosphere that was akin to Electric Picnic, and we drank it in with abandon and without a hint of a hangover the next day. Unlike “the fear” and recrimination that plagues you when you wake up with a hammering headache the morning after a blowout, an overindulgence in Topshop was no cause to break out into a sweat. You’d still have spent far less than a night out in Soho, and, anyway, they took back returns like they were running a rental not a retail business.

It was the clothes, however, that sealed the high-street store’s reputation. When Kate Moss was first spotted in a parka and Vivienne Westwood pirate boots almost two decades ago, I was one of many young women who scrambled straight to the Oxford Circus store and found the next best thing to the style of khaki parka she had been photographed wearing. I still have it and throw it on every day when I walk my dog. Topshop mimicked, marketed and sold celebrity style by the lorry load quicker than you could say ‘steal her style’.

When Kate Moss herself designed a collection for the brand in 2007, the veneration of Topshop reached fever pitch. The brand had achieved what none of its competitors had. They’d fulfilled every fashion lover’s dream by providing access to the iconic model’s wardrobe (the pieces in the collection were based on the contents of Moss’s own closet). By the mid-noughties, Topshop ruled the high street, and the runway, in fact, as it began staging seasonal catwalk shows at London fashion week in 2005, which regularly attracted fashion heavy-hitters such as Anna Wintour and Edward Enninful.

Although I don’t have a boho bone in my body so I didn't buy into the hot pants, mini tea dresses and fringed waistcoats that comprised the Kate Moss collection, I made many memorable purchases from the Oxford Circus store throughout the noughties. They included a pair of distressed leather oxblood boots from the vintage corner, which, in truth, I loved more than my boyfriend, and which lasted far longer than the relationship; and a pair of black super high-waisted wide-leg trousers, which remain in my wardrobe and, with a bit of defuzzing, will get a few more airings at least.

The last time I was in the store was November 2019 while on a work trip with my wonderful friend and sometime collaborator Sarah Rickard. The only thing better than being in Topshop at Oxford Circus is being there with her. She’s the one person I really enjoy shopping with because she becomes as wired as I do. Together we scoured, sifted, tried, styled and spoiled ourselves with pieces from the Boutique range, Topshop’s more premium offering. We may have been buying from the more grown-up range, but we were as giddy as teens as we circled the store several times over.

I didn’t know then that this would be my last visit to the era-defining bastion of fast fashion. Although I feel hugely nostalgic about the store, and the many Saturday afternoons I spent there planning outfits in the warm-up to a night out in the fashion capital, perhaps the moment is right to say goodbye. If the first 13 months of this new decade have taught us anything, it’s that nothing stays the same. Topshop Oxford Circus was then, slow fashion online is now.