As-You-Like-It Fashion

What’s the most exciting fashion store in the U.K. at the moment? Is it Topshop? No. Is it Ted Baker? Wrong again. It’s Missguided (Manchester, U.K.). And for those of you unaware of either the name or the proposition, you’re probably not female and aged, roughly, between 14 and 25.

And before visions of hot pink and sassy misses with a healthy leavening of ’tude spring to mind, think again. Missguided has attitude aplenty, but it is a lot more upfront, as it were, than most U.S. or U.K. audiences will be used to.

The first Missguided store opened in the Westfield mall in Stratford, East London, last year, and it boasted troupes of mannequins in their scanties posing aboard a pink monster truck in the store’s atrium. The target audience loved the risqué neon sign that read “Send me nudes,” and the lightboxes with messages such as “official babe uniform” and “do not feed the party animals.” Good ‘n tacky, might be the summary, and now a second store has opened in the Bluewater shopping centre, just southeast of London.

In place of the truck is a giant, semi-peeled banana where the fruit itself —  silver — peeks out. Mannequins sit astride the prop and the net effect is, well, raunchy heading toward the pornographic.

And don’t the shoppers love it! Retailers may have to go further to shock these days, but Missguided seems to be in the vanguard of those who are pushing the boundaries of what might be acceptable. This may not be to everybody’s taste, but that is the point. What Missguided – the online operator that is getting physical – has done well is understand its audience and give them what they want. Well done, and well done to Dalziel & Pow, the London-based design consultancy that has been creating these interiors.   

John Ryan is a journalist covering the retail sector, a role he has fulfilled for more than a decade. As well as being the European Editor of VMSD magazine, he writes for a broad range of publications in the U.K., the U.S. and Germany with a focus on in-store marketing, display and layout, as well as the business of store architecture and design. In a previous life, he was a buyer for C&A, based in London and then Düsseldorf, Germany. He lives and works in London.