It couldn’t have happened in Peter Jones. Peter Jones is the safe, solid store, where you buy your lamps and cushions, Start-Rite shoes and school blazers. What passes for drama might be a genteel little tussle in haberdashery over the last remaining length of ribbon or a desperate groan at the length of time it’s going to take to get the lacey blind put up.
Yesterday, on a perfectly ordinary evening in the busy cosmetics hall of Harvey Nichols, the unthinkable happened. A murder took place, in full view of the usual medley of shoppers. A man walked in, pulled out a gun and shot a young female shop assistant. He then turned the gun on himself.
Harvey Nicks has long been the place where drama happens. It’s the ritzy store, the shopaholic’s first port of call, the place where, from time to time, dodgy rumours surface about just who it is who heads up to the Fifth Floor bar after dark. It’s where long-legged Russian blondes go to find the skimpy dress for the night-time rendezous. It’s where the right bag (Balenciaga’s latest) or dress (last season’s green Lanvin pleated number) can sell out in an hour. It’s where young girls come to try out the latest “face” at the cosmetic counters and where some of the world’s coolest dressers think nothing of dropping thousands of pounds on an itsy-bitsy bit of clothing.
Ever since Patsy and Edina, all those years ago, romped around the aisles and dressing-rooms, and helped to put it on the fashion map, it’s had a place of its own in the national psyche. For the core Harvey Nichols fan, it was far more than a shop – it was a way of life. As Mary Portas, who worked at Harvey Nicks in its heyday, put it, “Harvey Nichols was more than a place to shop — it was a place where you felt you had to be.”
It was Lady Antonia Fraser who once opined that she never ever received an invitation without at once imagining what she would wear. For many a fashionista, no card ever landed on her mantelpiece without her at once imagining which department of Harvey Nichols she would aim for. It’s a perfumed haven for yummy mummies, ladies-who-lunch (and many still do – just drop in on the Fifth Floor any Saturday at noon), for girls on the make, for trust-fund babes, for professional women wanting to clinch a new job or look glamorous after dark. Where Liberty is niche and quirky, the creative, arty type’s heaven, Selfridges a brand-lover’s heaven, an urban jungle, and Harrods all things to all (seriously rich) men, Harvey Nicks is where the fashion-literate, the sophisticated, the lovers of bling buy their Jimmy Choos, their vertiginously priced handbags and drink their skinny lattes. They know that if this month’s Vogue hasn’t landed they can rely on Harvey Nicks to tell them what to wear and when. These are the sort of women who can identify a label from right across the floor, for whom the right shade of lipstick, the requisite handbag or the precise height of heel are matters of serious import. In Harvey Nicks they have a friend. They know it minds as much as they do.
Its Beyond Beauty is also a little-known haven for the pre and post-surgery set — it’s where they come to buy their StriVectin SD (a cream invented to “repair” stretch marks, and now touted as an anti-wrinkle saviour) and other helpful ranges for those whose necks aren’t what they were and whose lines are beginning to show.
It’s all a long way off from 1813 when it opened as a small linen shop on the corner of Sloane Street and Knightsbridge, selling fine tablecloths and napkins to the well-heeled wives of colonels and the landed gentry. Since then it’s had its ups and downs. It’s wafted in and out of fashion, as the times and the moods have changed. There have been times when it’s dropped slightly behind in the fashion stakes and it’s no secret that Vittorio Radice ’s sojourn at Selfridges sent a little frisson round their buyers’ ranks. It upped the ante which was well and good.
These days its heyday as the chief arbiter of what fashionable London wears has to be over. The days when the late Diana, Princess of Wales, haunted its floors and wowed the world in some of its designer numbers seem long gone. The world’s got quirkier and the consumer has become a promiscuous shopper. No loyalty-card scheme is ever going to keep her from picking up what she can wherever she finds it.
The truly stylish dresser haunts the vintage shop and the tiny little boutique with an individual take on the fashion scene. Nouveau riche shoppers, after all, have to shop somewhere and it’s Harvey Nicks that seems to get their plastic (though as one observer of the fashion scene put it — “nouveau riche is better than no riche”). It’s the spiritual home, one can’t help feeling, of Posh and Becks. It seems to have slightly missed its chance to be what all serious lovers of fashion had hoped it would become — the truly glamorous, elegant store of the fashion-aware woman. There’s a hint of chavdom lurking around those expensive aisles, a touch of the passé bling that is so very Nineties. It hasn't quite “got” the slightly more sophisticated, refined 21st century take on elegance and real glamour.
As one pundit said: “In a funny kind of way if something so sad was going to happen, it would have had to have happened there. There’s a hint of something darker, something a tad yobbish, a touch of footballers’ wives lurking in its image today.”
What one can’t ignore, though, it that where it still scores is in its clever blancing act of having the big glam brands (Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs, Balenciaga, Lanvin, Nina Ricci) and the little-known quirkier names (Giles, Sue Devitt Studio, Proenza Schouler, Thakoon and other names some of us may never have heard of).
And furthermore, if, like Vittorio Radice, the former supremo of Selfridges and Marks & Spencer's Lifestyle stores, you believe that theatre and drama is the key to modern retailing, Harvey Nichols has to win that particular contest hands down. Yesterday’s sad tragedy will leave deep and permanent wounds for those who knew and loved the players, but as for Harvey Nichols itself, it won’t have done it any permanent harm.
