Rant du jour - The TopShop Press Office

Up their own arses beyond belief. It’s TopShop for Christ’s sake, not Balenciaga. I emailed different people at the office four times, and called seven times over two days to get ONE lousy press release, which never appeared. And this problem is not germane to the Kate Moss collection, it's always been like this.

I suppose one could grudgingly admire their across-the-board incompetence crossed with a certain fuck off insouciance (ignoring both the poor interns toiling at the coal face of the fashion cupboard AND editors), but personallyI do expect a little help to enable me to do my job accurately & professionally. (When I'm speaking on the BBC World Service to over 25 million people, I want to know that I've got my facts right.)

Needless to say I was invited by the lovely people at Barneys to the Kate Moss party last night. I doubt the UK Topshop press office even note which journalists file to the UK from abroad. That would be FAR too intelligent a concept for their tiny little minds to process.*

It really gets my goat that the British fashion press are so scared of losing their TopShop 250 cards (40% press discount) that they hardly ever criticise ToSho in print. Sure, TopShop can be good, brilliant even, but it’s not consistently so, as the Kate Moss collection neatly encapsulates, so the press office might like to consider keeping the press onside by being efficient rather than by bribing them.

* Nov 07 ADDENDUM: Unlike the UK Banana Republic Press Office who do exactly that, for example.