Iconic British footwear brand to fold

So it seems like the end of an era: Dolcis, the British High Street shoe shop, which can trace its history back to a barrow trader in the 1860s, is to disappear from the High Street.

The news isn't surprising: the brand went into administration last month, and ninety stores closed immediately. Footwear company Stylo, which operates the Shellys and Barratts brands, has aquired Dolcis. They intend to run the stores for three months, after which ten will be rebranded as Barratts and the remaining 85 will close.

Dolcis is another casualty of the price squeeze in the middle market: fellow High Street store Ravel folded last year. With the advent of low priced, highly fashionable shoe ranges at Primark and New Look, which shift milllions of pairs a year, the market for shoes of similar quality but at prices 25 % higher was almost totally eroded.

It hasn't helped that the above clothing stores, along with most of the Arcadia Group (Topshop, Miss Selfridge, Principles), plus Zara, Mango etc all now sell shoes alongside their other retail offers, thereby reducing the need to visit separate shoe shops.

Fifteen years ago, this wasn't the case. Dolcis & Ravel were perceived as fashionable, part of the very limited shoe choice on the High Street but, as our access to fashion has become increasingly democratised, so our desire to buy more fashionable and cheaper footwear has increased. Dolcis was left flailing in the wake of a huge industry change, with no brand identity and an aging customer.

Image: Dolcis advert 1931. Available to buy from Prints-online.com

Topshop gladiator sandal

This is the shoe of the summer. £20 at Topshop. Slightly unfortunate that it's going to look very wrong on a lot of women. Do not even think about it unless your legs are up to it.( No point in diminshing the allure of your assets.) There is nothing more unflattering than an ankle strap chopping up your silhouette, giving you tree trunk calves. (I include those fug ugly mid calf boots in the dodgy silhouette group too: I have one word. Trotters.)

Boots - a hipster paradise?

New York's Page Six magazine* described Boots as 'the hip UK chain store' today. Boots may be many things, to many people, but the word to describe Britain's largest chemist/drugstore, known for dispensing old ladies' pile medication, prescribing hearing aids, and selling support stockings alongside Ruby & Millie cosmetics and Chanel scent is eclectic. Not hip.

*the USofA's homegrown version of The Sunday Times Style mag

The power of a brand name

I popped into Hampstead Gap last week for a quick poke around the sale (I love me a Gap sale), and found not just a pair of tailored black flannel short shorts for £2.99(£2.99!), but a big pile of Pierre Hardy Mary Jane style pointy toe flatties. When Pierre Hardy's shoes for The Gap launched in London, I was in Manhattan, and my beloved editor friend E purchased me a pair of the black patent platform heels and posted them to me back in New York.

I had fully expected all three styles in the Pierre range to have sold out by the time I returned to England in December, and certainly the black heels had been snapped up immediately, but thw two tone shoes and the Mary Janes were still kicking around in store.

A chat with the Hampstead manager revealed that they aren't being marketed as Pierre Hardy shoes, and so no one was buying them. Same story in Camden Gap. The manager's theory? If they stuck a big Pierre Hardy sign above them, they'd fly out of the store...

What Jane Did Next

We knew Jane Shepherdson had something up her sleeve after she left her job as brand director at Topshop. You don't become arguably the most influential woman in British retail and then leave to spend more time with your cats/children/lover.*

But who knew she'd be getting in bed with Baugar? It was announced today that she has finalised a deal with investment company Baugur to purchase Whistles with immediate effect. Jane becomes CEO of the retailer and is joined by Finance Director Keith Wilks and Marketing Director Jo Farrelly, both of whom worked with Jane at Topshop.

As a result of the management buy-in, Whistles will be separated from its former owner Mosaic Fashions through a newly-created company owned in part by Jane and her team. Commenting on the development of the brand Jane said, "We see a great opportunity to create something unique for the woman who loves great design, isn't scared of a little edginess and who wants to reference but not slavishly follow trends."

I adore Whistles. Not for its own label safe knits & trademark pretty tops, but for its clever buy of labels like Antik Batik & Michael Stars. (And I love its bargain sales too.)

But my love of Whistles goes way, way back. My very first black tie outfit came from Whistles in Oxford. When I was 16, my contemporaries all seemed to sport taffeta evening dresses with sweetheart necklines and poofy skirts (this was in 1988 before fashion had filtered down to teenagers) and, if you were really cool, you wore black DM lace ups or eight hole boots with your dress. Laura Ashley and Monsoon were popular, or else girls made their dresses in the Textiles classroom after school.

Me, I wore a curvy nipped in waist, black double breasted wool evening jacket with a low square neckline and long sleeves, matched with a staggeringly trendy (at the time)Ghost anthracite, dropped waist, full circle knee length skirt in Ghost's trademark wrinkled viscose. No one 'got' my outfit, but I loved it -and I loved my mother more for buying it for me from her meagre salary. I remember that the jacket cost £125 - an absolute fortune back then, and the skirt was £85. I still have both pieces, but the skirt no longer works now that I have hips, and the jacket strains over my bust. I've wrapped them both in tissue paper, and stored them in my parent's attic.

*delete as applicable

Mango sponsor Jean Pierre Braganza

I'm quite keen on Mango at the moment, following the announcement of an intelligent spot of sponsorship directed towards two young British designers. After having sponsored Osman Yousefzada's LFW show last season, (& whilst continuing to support Osman), they will also be sponsoring Jean Pierre Braganza.Braganza's signature sharp tailoring and deconstructed shapes can be seen at his show at the Mango flagship store on London's Oxford Street on Sunday, February 10. The utterly briiliant Osman Yousefzada, whose show also takes place at the store on the same day, debuts his collection of Little Black Dresses in 220 Mango stores worldwide from March.

Photo: Jean Pierre Braganza SS08. Vogue.com

Lucinda Chambers & Jaeger

There's been a rumour floating around over the weekend that Lucinda Chambers, fashion director of British Vogue, is the new creative director of Jaeger. A Condé Nast spokeswoman hadn't heard this, Lucinda Chambers says it's not true, and the Jaeger press office flatly denied it to a friend. However, as we all know, just because someone denies something, it doesn't mean that it won't happen one day...

This rumour comes on the heels of the announcement of Jaeger chairman Harold Tillman's appointment as chairman of the British Fashion Council.

It'll be interesting to see how Jaeger's Belinda Earl is planning to give the company the shot in the arm it so badly needs. Whilst editorial coverage of the Jaeger London line has been good, and the SS08 collection looks interesting, if a little schizophrenic, the Regent Street flagship store is currently packed with heavily discounted sale rails, and knocked down handbags.

On my visit this week, the store was not attracting the key 25-25 fashion market, but was filled with Jaeger's ex-core customer: confused looking Middle England housewives and grey haired grannies, desperately seeking in vain the comfortable Jaeger pieces they had been buying for the previous twenty years.

If Jaeger's continuing rebranding fails, it won't be for want of trying. If the Chambers rumours turn out to be true, with the BFC & British Vogue in his pocket, Tillman would just about have the British fashion industry all sewn up. Certainly shows would show what throwing money at a project could achieve.

Photo: Jaeger London SS08. www.jaeger.co.uk
(Very dodgy look book styling - she looks like she has a pot belly.)

Marks & Sparks

I was absolutely astonished on my trawl through the West End with Miss P last week to see that Marks & Spencers have substantially lowered their pricing. Where a pair of black lace knickers used to cost £12, with the matching bar chiming in at a painful £30, I picked up some very cute undies for a mere £5 for the knicks and £9.50 for the bra. Whilst I am the first to complain against overly cheap clothing, I have to say that I have never understood how knickers could be so very expensive for a mere sliver of fabric. Of course it doesn't help that I am a 32G (eek!) so I do need some underpinning, but still...I can only assume that with Primark lowering the price bar so successfully, that M&S have had no choice but to follow. Maybe this in some way explains M&S's less than stellar Christmas trading figures.

I also bought this dress for £39.50 after much humming & hawing. It seems so spot on trend for this SS08 season. If I was living in the UK, I wouldn't have touched it with a barge pole - I have no desire to wear such an instantly recognisable dress out & about, but I reckon in the US there's zero chance of bumping into anyone else in it.

I succumbed to temptation...

Thrift is to be my watchword this year. And I have the best of good intentions. It’s just that I do wish that New Year’s Resolutions didn’t coincide with the winning combination of a new season and the sales. Especially when I’m in London with all these lovely fast fashion shops that don't exist in New York.

Because, believe me, whilst America excels at fashion in the £100-£350 bracket (just take a look at the Intermix and shopbop websites if you don’t believe me), it truly sucketh in the below £100 category. There’s Forever 21 (New Look on acid. It gives me a headache), Banana Republic for office-y staidness/suburban housewife gear, and then the ubiquitous international chains (Hennes, Zara & Mango, which has just landed) if you want to look just like everyone else. The slightly more upmarket British High Street stores are starting to make an impression: French Connection, Sharon Millen and Reiss all have a strong presence in Manhattan but are the same price or more expensive than they are in London, which makes no sense at all with a 2:1 dollar/pound.

There is no equivalent of Topshop (which I think is over rated, but still), Miss Selfridge, New Look, River Island, Wallis, Warehouse, Principles, Oasis, Dorothy Perkins, or M&S Limited Collection: the stores where a savvy shopper can pick up interesting pieces to perk up her designer & vintage-filled wardrobe, and experiment with new looks.

I spent the whole of Monday in the West End with Miss P, helping her fill her new season wardrobe gaps and I was so super-restrained. But it killed me. There was a delicious fitted black blazer for £80 (reduced from £180) in Whistles, edged in navy blue grosgrain which I really, really want. But, all I bought was a pair of on-sale dancing shoes in New Look. They were £10/$20, so I think I can be forgiven?

Kurt Geiger sale

I usually avoid the sales like the plague. Way too many sweaty bodies and grabby hands, mixed with ankle bashing pushchairs and over-heated stores. No thank you. Of course this just means that I troll the interweb instead looking for bargains when I should be filing copy. T turned up to give me a lift to A's baby shower last weekend wearing the most perfect black Whistles (of all unlikely places) ankle boots with opaque Wolfords and a tiny dress, and I lusted badly for her look. Hers have sold out now, but these Kurt Geiger ones are just £99 reduced from £180. I like the dip in the front as this always makes your ankles look thinner & your legs longer. Only problem is that I am on an economy drive and unfort my KG press discount card only works on full-price merchandise. Yah boo sucks. I must stop torturing myself.

Coda to my Cavalli rant

I could rant for quite some time about big name diffusion collections, designed by their studios, produced in horrible fabrics, and sold in High Street chains, but I;ve written about it at length elsewhere, so here I will content myself by pointing out that if I want diffusion designer on the High Street, then I look for the new and interesting designers who I know will have designed tiny capsule ranges themselves, which support their main line and raise consumer awareness of their nascent brand not their over-priced handbags and umpteen licences for fragrance, cosmetics, sunglasses and the like.

Topshop Boutique is good at this: Preen, Jonathan Saunders and Emma Cook have done stand out collections of maybe ten or twenty pieces for them, and I’m particularly looking forward to Next Big Thing Osman Yousefzada’s SS08’s collection of twelve little black dresses for Mango.

Julien Macdonald signs with H Samuel

Well, just as I wrote that British high street jewellery chain H Samuel needed a shot in the arm, WGSN reports today that Welsh bling-tastic eveningwear designer Julien Macdonald is to move into jewellery with an exclusive deal to design a collection for them. Although I do wonder just how attractive it will be, given that the price point of the limited collection of 13 pieces will be priced between £35-£95, and that Julien and good taste often seem many, many miles apart.

Knock me down with a feather: Ernest Jones launches perfectly pretty jewellery range

British High Street jewellery chains aren't exactly known for their ravishing designs. Sure if you want a bog standard diamond engagement ring, a natty gold sovereign ring, some 18ct gold bangles or an Anniversary clock then you are laughing, but pieces you'd actually consider stylish? I don't think so.



The three major players in the UK are H Samuel, Ernest Jones & Goldsmiths and, whilst Goldsmiths have raised their game over the past couple of years by collaborating with the likes of Matthew Williamson (altho I'd be hard put to name a company with which Williamson hasn't collaborated), the other two still have more than a whiff of mass-market about them.

But, I'm always happy to be proved wrong and, when I opened a press release from Ernest Jones' PR preparing to file it in the trash as usual, I was impressed to find images of these six rings, with their pretty art deco feel and clever pricing. (Especially given my habit of losing rings). Perhaps Father Christmas could take note?

Clockwise from the top: 18ct white gold 1carat cluster ring £1200, 9ct White Gold Diamond & Brazilian Garnet £285, 9ct White Gold Diamond & London Blue Topaz £100, 9ct Gold Brown Diamond & Amthyst £130, 9carat White Gold Diamond & London Blue Topaz £265, 9carat white gold diamond and Brazilian Garnet £235

About bloody time too: Mango to stock size 16

Rejoice, international Spanish retailer Mango has finally seen sense: the brand's fashion ranges are now available in UK sizes 6-18, in a bid to make them accessible to a wider range of women. And, to publicise the move, Mango has signed the iconic US plus-sized model Crystal Renn. A generous size 16, Crystal has modelled for Italian Vogue and, during the height of the furore over size zero models, walked the runway for Jean Paul Gaultier during the SS06 shows

I would like to dedicate this blog entry to all those girls who have spotted a pretty piece in Mango, looked in vain for a size 3, only to be told by a dismissive, waif-ish Euro that, "oh zat only comes in sizes 1 & 2." This means that for years Mango have been ordering part of their stock only in a UK 8 (US4) & UK10 (US6). I always thought this was somewhat self-destructive, certainly in the British market, seeing as how 49% of British women are over a size 16 (US12), let alone a UK12. I am a UK12 with a size 16 bust but, as they cut small anyway, I have not been able to wear their clothes for years. (Not a great loss, but occasionally frustrating.)

Of course one understands that certain brands have a certain vision of their customer, but when you are a mass-market, High Street brand, this seems a little, well, picky
Top: Crystal Renn for Italian Vanity Fair March 2004
Bottom: Jean Paul Gaultier SS06

Random stuff

1) The last time I bought anything from Oasis was in Summer 1999, when lots of us girls in Vogue House bought these cool stretch shirtdresses in forest green and in black. And all my girlfriends and my sister bought one too once I'd marched them down to Oxford Street. I haven't seen anything in the intervening 7 years that I'd bother with but, having seen their AW07 collection, I can safely say that Oasis is back on form. The coats! The dresses!

2)There is nothing like walking into the chippie and saying "Bag a chips, open please." Yum. Now I don't have to do it for another year.

3)The dachshund now has its own Facebook page, courtesy of my sister.

4)According to The Evening Standard, TopShop has been ordered to pay £12 000 compensation for copying a Chloé yellow dungaree dress. It has also had to shred all the copies. About bloody time too. I am getting a bit sick of rifling through the High Street rails, saying to myself, "Temperley" (Principles), "Marc"(Hennes), etc etc etc. 'Inspired by' is one thing. Blatant rip-off quite another.

5) Taxis in London: £15 to the Angel from Bond Street! Bloody Hell. Tea at Claridges: £11.55 for a pot of Earl Grey for two! Thank Christ for an expense account.

6) Clare Waight Kellor: possibly the most intelligent, switched on fashion designer I've had the pleasure of interviewing.

7) Indian takeaways in London are spectacularly good. New York ones are fit for the bin and nothing else. (Although I'm desperate to be persuaded otherwise).

8) Men in New York are much sexier.

How to get the pregnant Britney/Jordan look: Head for TopShop

One of the things that influenced my flight to Manhattan from London was the endless stream of girlfriends getting knocked up. Don't get me wrong, I rather like small children - so long as they are a) clean b) at arms length, and c) nowhere near my cream sofas but, for the time being, I've no desire to have my social life tramelled on a daily basis by the demands of other people's offspring.

However one of the things that I enjoy most right now is torturing Miss P with inappropriate sartorial suggestions for her bump. She'll be seven months gone when she gets married in September, so it's been joyous looking for staggeringly ridiculous garb for her wedding and for her honeymoon. TopShop Maternity, in particular, comes up trumps in this arena:




I PARTICULARLY like the way they've named the denim skirt 'Pelmet'.

Pictures from topshop.com

On-line shopping: my love hate relationship with TopShop

On-line shopping is an addictive past time. It's simple at 3am, when it's hot and humid and sleep is impossible, to idly flick through pages of frocks. And, of course, I always seem to end up at topshop.com (by way of netaporter.com and all the rest). Although I have a love/hate relationship with the store, and I just can't abide the slovenly approach to PR as practiced by their press office, from 3710 miles away the odd piece starts to seem rather attractive. Although, as suggested in my post below, I should be buying pencil skirts and stilettos for next season, I have at least two more months of super hot, sticky weather in Manhattan and all I really want to buy right now are loose frocks. Still, at TopShop prices this isn't going to break the bank, and the postage is only £5 more to the US. (Although their system cancelled my order twice for no apparent reason, costing me a VERY expensive call back to the UK - hmm, a lot in common with the press office then.)

So I bought, gulp, five dresses, including these two:

Liberty Bell Sleeve Dress. Colour: Vibrant Pink. Code:10Y15RPNK £75

Tulip Flower Tier Dress. Colour: Yellow. Code: 10F31QYLW
£40

TopShop - Sir Philip Green confirms permanent presence in US

“We are one hundred percent coming to America. It’s not if but when,” Sir Phillip Green told me Tuesday night. Rumour has been rife concerning a possible TopShop opening in the US, with some commentators speculating that the Kate Moss collection collaboration with upscale department store Barneys signalled the end of parent company Arcadia’s independent US expansion plans. Not so, said Sir Phillip, when I asked him, “In fact we were looking at sites today.”

It has always been presumed by business commentators that TopShop would be unlikely to open first in New York, as the city is not thought to be reflective of retail trends in America as a whole. This would make it difficult for a Manhattan TopShop store to provide a reliable barometer for the success of the brand elsewhere in the country. Prior to the launch with Barneys, the only places to buy TopShop in America have been at Opening Ceremony in Downtown Manhattan & in LA, which stocks a very small range in its upstairs gallery.

And that is my very last word on TopShop for quite some time.

HIgh Street: London vs New York

The lack of well-designed cheapo clothes in Manhattan is starting to exercise me greatly. My wardrobe looks tired: my AW clothes have been worn & worn, and it's too bloody cold to break out any acceptable SS pieces. When I want a quick fix here there's literally nowhere to go. I've always relied on a mix of New Look/ToSho/Miss S etc, vintage and sample sale/private order designer to pull my look together. Sure, vintage here is particularly strong, esp in Williamsburg but I just don't have time for half a day's rootling. I'm still waiting for my SS private orders to arrive from London and the sample sales I've been to here so far are crapola. I tried Forever 21 yesterday but got scared & ran away. Think New Look on acid. 10 000 pieces of clothing rammed on rails, some so far above yr head that you get arm ache just reaching for them, and nearly everything in size twiglet and poly blends.

Banana Republic is all very well, but it's not cheap enough and everything is taupe or navy. Zara - I'd rather save up to buy real Chanel. Proenza by Target? I don't think so - the good pieces sold out within seconds. And the ubiquity of Hennes here means that everyone has the same few pieces. Dull dull dull. I want NEON, print and interesting. A couple of clever bargains is all I ask.

Unless someone comes up with a solution, I am going to acquire an expensive online shopping habit and a v gd relationship with Fedex.