ALEXANDRA SHULMAN (pictured): Eight days to go and changing rooms will be opened for the first time in more than a year. As it happens, changing rooms are one of the few things I haven’t much missed because they are, across the board, terrible
Eight days to go and changing rooms will be opened for the first time in more than a year. As it happens, changing rooms are one of the few things I haven’t much missed because they are, across the board, terrible.
Why this should be so is truly mystifying, since the biggest difference between shopping for clothes online and in real life is the ability to try something on immediately.
To touch the fabric, see how it hangs on the body. And check the colour – in a changing room you can’t add a filter turning a dingy grey into a gentle jade as I’m certain some brands do with their online offerings.
If I owned a clothing shop, I would be chucking everything at improving the changing room. Let’s cast our minds back to the old days when they were one of the million things in life we all took for granted.
Firstly, even finding them is tiresome as they are invariably stuck somewhere near the back of the shop, hidden away as if they are something to be ashamed of rather than the key to a purchase.
In big chains or department stores, bored-looking assistants hand out tokens to log how many pieces we are taking in. Is that an attractive way to treat a customer? Guilty until proved innocent of shoplifting?
Then there’s the ubiquitous downlighting which, as we have all learnt from a year of video calls, does our appearance few favours. And claustrophobic cubicles which usually allow you little space to stand back and get a good look.
How many offer enough hanging space? Do we have to leave our own clothes in a crumpled pool on the floor?
Enough! It’s time for a changing room revolution. Stores should be investing money to make these spaces a highlight of shopping: enjoyable, relaxing – even luxurious – places to spend time in, encouraging us to buy.
I bought a top online last week, counting down the days to its arrival, eagerly ripping open the bag when it came. Alas, wrong size. The swap to the right size will take another week and involve a long queue at the post office. If I had tried it on in the store, I would have been able to wear it that night.
Clothes are not like canned veg or even ink cartridges that we can buy on repeat. Being able to try them makes us more confident of buying. Both the much-loved M&S and John Lewis are closing branches around the country as they lose physical customers. It’s no coincidence their changing rooms are rubbish.
Now I know why my man is cross…
It being Easter, I have been buying hot cross buns. Two weeks ago I picked up a couple of delicious home-made ones for my menfolk.
David ate his, I imagined happily, so I bought some more a few days later. ‘Oh,’ he said, as he rummaged in the bread bin. ‘I see you’ve bought more hot cross buns.’ I sensed the purchase wasn’t met with the glee I had hoped but put that down to his anxiety about waiting for a second jab.
The next day there was a lot of huffing and puffing about how the jam had disappeared from the fridge. So I bought more – Tiptree Strawberry, if anyone’s interested. Now, I thought, David is well set up – hot cross buns and jam available.
But nothing is that simple. He hadn’t, he said, particularly wanted jam. He was only looking for it to go with his hot cross buns and, as it turns out, he doesn’t much like hot cross buns. I was tempted to say maybe that’s because you eat them with jam – who does that? – but resisted.
We’ve been together for 15 years and I never knew he didn’t like hot cross buns. That he only eats them because he thought it pleased me.
‘I always thought you buying hot cross buns was the kind of nostalgic thing you enjoy, like being excited about snow,’ he explained.
And all this time I had been buying them because I thought he liked them. Will we ever really know each other?
Being vague is only thing that’s certain
I’m fascinated by Denise Coates, the boss of Bet 365 and the highest-paid woman in the UK, who last year earned £469 million – about £54,000 an hour, Shulman writes
As someone who has lost a number of people in my life through suicide, I was interested to hear John Preston, Robert Maxwell’s biographer, discuss the subject recently. Investigating the disgraced publisher’s unsolved death, he suggested there is a less defined line between accident and suicide than we might generally consider.
It reminded me of when Tom Ford told me there was no such thing as definitive hetero or homosexuality and we were all on a spectrum. Vagueness is the new certainty.
Chic ‘magazine’ I’d brand a catalogue
When is a magazine not a magazine? Even before I worked in the business, I loved magazines. It was the way they introduced me to new things – fashion and beauty tips, music reviews, interviews, snippets of gossip – that I adored.
So I was excited to read that Bottega Veneta, one of the most successful fashion brands of the moment, were launching Issued, a quarterly audio visual magazine.
It’s entertaining – Bottega boots made from jelly wobble on a table, there’s a daring display of parkour (jumping from rooftop to rooftop) by a team dressed in Bottega Veneta padded jackets. Biba founder Barbara Hulanicki wears their jewellery and US rapper Missy Elliott poses in their shades.
But this isn’t a magazine – it’s a brand catalogue, every bit as hard-selling as the Next Directory. And the idea that it could be in any way considered one is dispiriting for those of us who remain true fans of the real things.
The secret to being ridiculously rich
I’m fascinated by Denise Coates, the boss of Bet 365 and the highest-paid woman in the UK, who last year earned £469 million – about £54,000 an hour.
Call me trivial but it’s not her management skills I’m intrigued by but pretty well every other thing about her – most of which is unusually hard to discover. All we know is that she is building a modernist palace in Cheshire.
There are hardly any pictures of Coates around – the three or four that do exist show a simply dressed woman with cropped hair. Where does she shop? Where does she holiday? Does she cook? Is she a lark or an owl? But information is there none.
It just goes to show that even in these over-sharing days, you can be someone who puts Beyoncé’s earnings in the shade, make more in a year than the Queen’s total wealth, and yet still remain completely private if you wish.
