Last month, helping my parents clear out some cupboard space in our family home, I stumbled across a fashion treasure trove. Buried underneath a pile of scratchy old towels was a blue Ikea bag crammed with relics from my teenage wardrobe; they’d clearly been earmarked for a charity shop at some point, but never left the house. Of course, not all of them were worth getting excited about (ratty old freebie T-shirt from a nightclub ominously named “Loveshack”, anyone?) But I was genuinely thrilled that this cache included a couple of pieces from Kate Moss’s old Topshop collections: a navy blouse with massive puffy sleeves, and a sky blue dress covered in painterly red poppies.

Somehow, more than a decade and a half has elapsed since I bought them with my babysitting money. And yet neither item would look particularly out of place in my wardrobe today. The top, especially, with its extravagant sleeves, could easily be from a recent collection by Damson Madder or Ganni; back in 2008, I was mildly perturbed when someone told me it was “very Lady Di”, but I now know that to be the highest compliment. It got me thinking about just how well Topshop’s old designs – I can’t bring myself to describe these clothes as “vintage”, because that would make me vintage, too – have managed to withstand the test of time.

So when speculation started to bubble up earlier this week, suggesting that the beloved brand might be about to make some kind of comeback, my ears pricked up, as if responding to some siren call operating at a frequency only audible to millennials. On Wednesday, Topshop shared Instagram posts that read “we missed you too” and “we’ve been listening”. The posts, it turned out, were advertising a London treasure hunt competition and the return of the brand’s standalone website, but devotees are hoping that this could still augur bricks and mortar premises some time in the near future.

After all, this stunt comes a few months after the Danish company Bestseller (owner of brands including Vero Moda and Jack & Jones) bought a 75 per cent stake in Topshop, prompting chief executive José Antonio Ramos Calamonte to state that they “will consider” plans to get back on the high street again. I can only hope that Alexa Chung and/or Pixie Geldof are on standby for the inaugural DJ set, should a grand opening actually take place. Because in order to have half a hope of surviving in a tough retail climate, the brand desperately needs to bring back the spirit and the style of Old Topshop.

When I – along with thousands of other fashion-loving, nostalgic millennials – talk about Old Topshop, I’m referring to the brand’s imperial phase, an epoch that roughly stretched between 2000 and 2015. For the first half of this period, Jane Shepherdson was in the top role of brand director; she oversaw Topshop’s transformation from a run-of-the-mill high street label to a fashion trailblazer. Her approach was to forget designing for “some mythical customer who someone or other’s created”, as she once told The Guardian, and instead to just focus on selling “clothes that you and I and everyone we know would love”. It really worked – and so did the just-about-affordable collaborations with then-rising young designers such as Christopher Kane.

Shepherdson left in 2007, but Topshop’s fortunes continued to rise thanks to other, clever team-ups such as the Kate Moss collab, which launched that year and ran until 2010, with a brief comeback in 2014, partnerships with future stars such as JW Anderson and Mary Katrantzou, and the attention-grabbing Topshop Unique shows at London Fashion Week. The colossal flagship store at Oxford Circus was a site of pilgrimage for fashion obsessives from London and much further afield; urban legends of the coolest girls being scouted by model agencies or snapped by street style photographers outside the entrance helped add to the general mystique. So did the fact that every time you visited, a new nail salon / dedicated piercing bar / hair bleaching station seemed to have popped up on one of the lower floors, and you never seemed to be less than six feet away from a former T4 presenter.

But as the 2010s wore on, Topshop lost its golden touch. They tried to keep up with the faster-than-fast fashion whirlwind of PrettyLittleThing and Boohoo, but never matched the extremely low price point offered by those upstart brands. This only served to alienate their long-time fans (who just didn’t really want everything to be cropped, or decimated by arbitrary cut-out sections) while never really getting younger customers onside. Before the pandemic hit, sales were already nosediving.

Topshop has been languishing in a strange sort of retail purgatory since 2021, when the brand shut down its high street stores amid the collapse of parent company Arcadia Group, the retail empire presided over by Philip Green. Shopping site ASOS, then enjoying a lockdown-related boom, bought Topshop, and a few other Arcadia brands such as Miss Selfridge, in a £265m deal. Since then, it’s been available to buy online, but the magic has all but ebbed away. Yes, you can still buy Joni jeans (if you’re still wedded to your skinny jeans, that is) but they’re buried among similar styles from hundreds of fast fashion competitors. Frankly, there’s currently very little to set Topshop’s current offerings apart from the Stradivariuses and the Bershkas and the Missguideds of the world. So, in order to make any potential comeback a proper success, it seems clear to me that something needs to change.

Whenever my friends and I (all of us in our late twenties or early thirties) bemoan how hard it seems to shop for clothes right now, given the preponderance of disposable fast fashion that barely lasts one wash, our conversations always tend towards one solution: if only they’d bring back Peak Topshop. And so, I reckon, the cleverest thing that Topshop could do would be to go through their back catalogues and resurrect some of their old designs – a balance of the really obviously retro stuff, to appeal to the nostalgia crowd, and some of the more classic pieces that still look timeless now. They’d do well to look back at the materials they used then, too: I still wear Topshop stuff from decades ago, which must have been washed hundreds of times, and most of it has proved to be way more durable than stuff I’ve bought on the high street in the last year or so.

open image in gallery

The timing could hardly be better, given fashion’s current obsession with all things Noughties. The Kate Moss collaboration has been having another moment in the spotlight ever since the costume designer on Saltburn confirmed that she’d sourced dresses from the collections to kit out the film’s extras in authentic period finery. Last year, Vogue reported that there’d been over 58,000 searches for the collection on resale app Vinted in the previous 12 months (some of them were me, although I’ve never yet moved fast enough to snap anything up). It’s not all millennials hankering after their lost youth either; much of the Noughties resurgence and romanticisation has been driven by Gen Z, who were toddlers the first time around.

A “greatest hits”-style capsule collection of Kate Moss-style pansy print tea dresses, a few of those really great trenches and faux-fur coats, the high-necked floaty dress that Alexa Chung wore to a Topshop catwalk show, and that iconic Christopher Kane crocodile T-shirt would be a good place to start. I reckon the zebra jeans from the 2012 collaboration with JW Anderson would go down well, too, in these pro-animal print times (my OG pair are in the attic). Hell, they could even throw in a few three-for-£6 jolly socks for good measure.

Leaning into nostalgia, rather than trying to race fast fashion competitors to the bottom, is certainly the way to go. And if you’re reading this, Topshop bosses, I’d happily volunteer to dig through the archives. I’d much rather that than finally admit it’s probably time to start shopping at M&S.