Season after season, the Topshop girl is a spirited party girl at heart. It’s this perennially upbeat and laidback mood that has made the high street colossus’s catwalk shows a London Fashion Week highlight: that, and the fact that there’s a stronger than average chance you’ll spot Kate Moss sitting front row (there’s also the draw of the pre-show catering, perfect for staving off hanger at LFW’s Sunday afternoon tipping point…)
This September’s show marked the first time that Topshop has shrugged off the ‘Unique’ branding that had always accompanied its higher end offering, re-casting its ‘see now, buy now’ collection (which went on sale online immediately after guests left their seats) as Series 001. Inspiration came from the spirit of Soho: a grittier Soho of a few decades back, rather than the largely gentrified district of today, with the show notes name-checking now-closed haunts like Madame Jojo’s and the Revuebar.
Things might have ended on a more casual note – the finale saw a girl gang of models including Jourdan Dunn, Hailey Baldwin and Lineisy Montero pairing customised ‘name’ T-shirts with assorted denim – but this was a collection designed with night time in mind, and one that presented a slew of options for party season (if you can snap them up quick enough). For braver souls, delicately embellished negligée-esque slips - including one particular standout in powdery Cinderella blue, as modelled by Dunn - presented a glamorous counterpoint to pyjama dressing; other crowd-pleasing pieces came in the form of fitted, squared-necked sheath dresses in pastel shades (a nod to Princess Di?) and marabou-decked bandeaus. Series 001 comes with a lower price point than we’ve come to associate with past Unique lines, a tactic which has only succeeded in making this collection seem even more desirable.
Though the show notes might have explicitly harked back to the days before Instagram, expect to soon see plenty of pieces from the show’s daytime offering on a social media feed near you: think faux fur jackets, wearable cable knits and a wide-lapelled overcoat in the most millennial-baiting shade of pale pink.
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