When I worked at Condé Nast in the Nineties, we went to Topshop every lunchtime. We would replicate the season’s catwalk looks with key pieces, we would brave the huge, communal changing rooms, we would find our Friday night outfits and get ready in the Vogue House bathrooms, stuffing our work clothes in our desks: it was our mecca.
In the Noughties and 2010s we queued for Kate Moss’s wardrobe, perfectly refashioned for the masses, or for Vogue editor Kate Phelan’s pared-down aesthetic or Beyonce’s athleisure brand, Ivy Park. If you were listening hard enough on 30th November 2020, when Topshop’s parent company Arcadia went into administration, you could hear the hearts of fashion-forward Generation X and Millennial women slightly breaking. Ultimately Covid killed it but, really, all the women like me had stopped Top-shopping years ago, dismayed at the spaghetti-strapped, fast-fashion rag-house it had become.
Gen Z teens of the time hadn’t inherited the Topshop fever; they were all over the Boohoos and ASOS anyway. Indeed, ASOS swallowed Topshop and Topman in 2021, closing all its shops including the totemic Oxford Circus flagship and taking it online, where it has floundered further.
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This week it was announced that ASOS has sold a 75% stake in the Topshop and Topman brands in a new joint venture deal with Heartland A/S, an investment and holding company representing the interests of Bestseller owner and ASOS shareholder Anders Holch Povlse. The venture will grant ASOS certain design and distribution rights for the Topshop and Topman brands in return for a royalty fee.
ASOS CEO José Antonio Ramos Calamonte, said of the deal: “The joint venture and the launch of the refinancing will accelerate our strategy to both offer customers the best and most relevant product and to turn ASOS into a company that delivers sustainable, profitable growth.”
In November 2023, Calamonte announced ASOS’s “Back to Fashion” strategy on his path to returning the company to profitability by 2025: “Focused on bringing the best fashion and most inspirational experience to its twenty-something fashion-loving customers and delivering sustainable, profitable growth”.
The new Topshop deal is an acceleration of this core strategy: ASOS plans to relaunch Topshop.com within six months of completion and teased that there’s an “opportunity to expand Topshop and Topman’s customer reach through selected wholesale partners — both online and offline”. Be still my heart.
So what will be the key to unlocking the hearts of the twenty-something fashion-loving customers? Surely it has to be influencer-driven? Harnessing the lives and wardrobes of the era’s It-girls has always been Topshop’s secret sauce – it was the cool girls’ brand and when the cool girls left, it lost its power. The success of Kate Moss’ collections was everything to do with what she wore every day, and less about how she was styled in the fashion spreads.
In the 2010s, a typical Topshop Unique front row saw Moss, Alexa Chung and Cara Delevingne, all women whose styles were/are slavishly copied. Delevingne was arguably the first Instagram It-girl. The then-Hailey Baldwin, a woman capable of launching a TikTok trend with a flick of her finger, was the face of Topshop Denim in 2015.
Today’s internet It-girls such as Bella Hadid, Madeline Argy, Sofia Richie Grainge, Bieber, Alex Consani, Quenlin Blackwell, Paloma Elsesser and Emma Chamberlain have the power to give a brand heat. As the current culture conductor Charli XCX put it in her hymn to It, 360: “I’m your favourite reference, baby.” She is working with H&M and Skims. A strategy that involves social media’s fashion gatekeepers will be essential to deliver Topshop’s success. According to Business of Fashion’s recent whitepaper: “TikTok is the top platform for discovery of new brands for users”.
In the Nineties and Noughties, as well as emulating the It-girls, we also used Topshop to access high-fashion looks for less, an act that has now been legitimised for social audiences as “dupe culture”; practically a religion on TikTok. The key disseminators of the best dupes are creators and influencers, seamlessly guiding their audiences through the trends of the day.
News of the Topshop deal comes at a time of renewed enthusiasm for the brand. In May Vogue quoted the fact that searches for Kate Moss’s Topshop collections are up 45 per cent month-on-month on Depop; this is inspired in part by the fact the collections featured heavily in the 2023 hit film Saltburn, as well as the 2022 TV adaptation of Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love. This all indicates fertile ground for the brand to flourish in: legacy storytelling driven by figures of the social zeitgeist.
By Emilie McMeekan, features director of CORQ.
Everything I Know About Love is the epitome of TikTok’s early 2010s obsession