The Drift Towards Department Stores

AT WHAT POINT does a fashion store become something else? When it comes to the mid-market there is, currently, a creeping tendency for clothing stores to keep adding elements which slowly but surely take them away from their original purpose and morph them instead into department stores.

In the U.K., two or three large chains serve to make the point: Marks & Spencer, Primark and stores from the Fraser Group.

For the most part, Fraser Group makes its money from a budget sportswear chain called Sports Direct. Visit many of its stores, however, and the chances are good that you’ll see a collection of U.K. brands of yesteryear, from Slazenger to Evans Cycles, by way of Londsdale and Everlast. Then there is House of Fraser, now renamed Frasers, which was a standalone department store chain back in the day, yet currently in some Sports Direct locations it occupies one or two floors of a total proposition.

Sports Direct remains, of course, a sports apparel outfit, but the addition of multiple labels and former standalone retailers makes it something else.

Next up there is Next. This was originally a mid-market semi-formalwear retailer when it opened in the 1980s. Now its larger stores incorporate homewares, Costa Coffee, Paperchase (a stationer) and, in some locations, Bath & Body Works and Gap. The drift beyond clothing is very apparent and what shoppers are in fact presented with is a department store, by any other name – just one that is not associated with luxury, as it so often the case when you look at the sector.

Primark, is on the way towards doing something similar, although apparel still predominates. The shift, however, is happening, and in the U.K. it has even opened standalone homewares stores.

Department stores, as many tend to think of them, may be under pressure. That does not mean they are defunct. Far from it. Like many other things in retail, the term is a convenient label and it is subject to change.