I’m still in mourning for Topshop – there’s no theatre to shopping online

telegraph.co.uk:

was bought for £378m by IKEA last year. No longer will time-pressed office workers, fiftysomething mums, reverent teens, giddy tourists or Beyonce be found within its neon layers.

In the 1990s and early aughts, Topshop Oxford Circus was the coolest store there was - a place to see and be seen, where model scouts lurked outside trying to spot the next Kate Moss and famous people lurked inside trying to find the next slip dress that would make a splash on the red carpet (I once saw Joan Collins, her baseball cap and giant sunglasses doing absolutely nothing to disguise the fact that she was perusing the dress section with as keen an eye as the rest of us).That was the thing about Topshop: it was a broad church.

It was a rite of passage for teens, but it also served women well into their retirement years. My mother bought a new pink coat there for her 80th.

On a three-generation shopping expedition to the Princes Street Topshop in Edinburgh, she bought a navy cardie for herself and a leopard print skirt for her then-tween granddaughter.