View from the Top
NEW YORK - "It feels like I've died and walked into heaven's closet," said Heather Lin, a comely 22-year-old art student, as she stroked a pair of so-called liquid metallic leggings at Topshop in SoHo. "I've been waiting for this moment for months."
Apparently, so has the rest of New York. Topshop, a 45-year-old British chain known for its Kate Moss-designed collections and high-fashion platform shoes (along with inexpensive lingerie and neon rubber bracelets), opened its first American outpost last month in a scene that looked like Pamplona during bull season. If you believed any of the breathless pre-opening coverage, it'd be easy to think that the arrival of Topshop is akin to science finding a cure for wrinkles or Amy Winehouse finally releasing a new album.
Obviously, it's not quite a miracle, but it is 25,000 square feet of delicious retail eye candy - an eccentric British circus of day-glow colors and clothes accompanied by a soundtrack of bubbly 1980s synth-pop favorites. Hollywood ingenues Chloë Sevigny and Kirsten Dunst have professed their love for the store multiple times.
Bostonians can check out the offerings on www.topshop.com and www.topman.com, but I decided I needed to see the store in person, primarily to find out why lines stretched down the block for nearly two weeks after it opened. On an earlier visit to Topshop in London, I simply thought of it as the British equivalent of Zara or H&M, and not exactly a place worth waiting an hour to buy a $20 black denim skinny tie.
"In the UK, Topshop has been very canny with its image, presenting itself as more youthful than Zara and more fashion forward than H&M," says Hadley Freeman, a fashion writer at London's Guardian newspaper. "Topshop has always been very good at having a high turnover of clothes and keeping the prices low. The question is whether they will be able to maintain that low price point in America."
In the United States, Topshop's prices are higher than competitor H&M, and roughly equivalent to Zara, except for higher-end collections. Topshop's owner, billionaire businessman Sir Philip Green, says it is the range of merchandise that helps set the chain apart from other fast-fashion offerings. Green says his team of 17 designers will introduce between 200 and 300 new fashions every two weeks.
"What we offer is a cut above," Green told me last week while he was visiting the United States. "We have Kate Moss designing for us. We have other collections from British designers like Jonathan Saunders. The response has been fantastic."
He said sales have been brisk in New York and the cash registers were certainly getting a workout as I wandered around the hyperactively merchandised store like a jet-lagged tourist in Tokyo. Still, for some people, the store has not lived up to the crush of pre-opening publicity or the glittering opening party with Moss, Jay-Z, Jennifer Hudson, Anna Wintour, Marc Jacobs, and Debbie Harry.
"We covered it to death," confesses Amy Odell, a writer for New York magazine's fashion blog. "We were so excited about it. But to be honest with you, I was really disappointed when I finally went in. I even tried a couple of things on. I wasn't that impressed. Maybe because there was too much hype. I didn't feel like the quality of the clothes was worth the price. A lot of the clothes were, frankly, unwearable."
Green was tight-lipped about US expansion plans - including whether Boston will be part of them. But given that Topshop has 2,400 stores in more than 30 countries, it seems inevitable that a full-scale British invasion will take place in the United States when the economy finally comes out of its coma.
But are we already over-saturated with trendy and cheap fast fashion from European chains? Both Zara and H&M recently reported declining revenues, indicating that even the most price-conscious fashionistas are holding tightly to their wallets.
Green has a huge challenge on his hands: Topshop will need to stand out if he expects recession-weary shoppers to line up for harem pants and leopard print playsuits.
Christopher Muther can be reached at muther@globe.com. 