I read a lot about how homogenised the high street has become and how every town has the same set of multinational retailers offering the same set of clothes.
To some eyes that's progress, I suppose: a democratisation of style.
If it's true, though, why do I still feel so – and I apologise for using this word but it's the first one that comes to mind – provincial when I visit London and (not for the first time) curse Muji for not having a branch in Scotland?
I'm told there was one in Glasgow once – I've even found mention of it on the blog of Edinburgh-based designer Lisa Gordon Scott, like me a fan of the Japanese minimalists – but for the past decade at least we've been a Muji-free zone. Trident missiles, we have; plain, classic clothes and beautifully designed stationery which would carry the Muji label if they went in for such things as labels, we do not.
I have the same feeling of exclusion when I open a magazine – let's say it's Time, because that's the one in front of me – and read that Tadashi Yanai, head of Japanese clothing firm Uniqlo, features in the publication's annual power list as one of the most influential people in the world today, and that his company's "well-made, well-priced casual clothing has become a global retail phenomenon". Not in Scotland, it hasn't. We have no Uniqlo.
This isn't just about Japanese style, either. I'll feel the same way when J Crew opens its UK store later this year – the first outside North America – and though I've never set foot inside a Banana Repulic shop, I'd certainly like to have the opportunity to do so without having to cross the Border. Even Manchester has one, just as it has a Selfridges. The upmarket department store can also be found in Birmingham, but a mooted Glasgow shop never materialised. Or if it did it must be a Brigadoon-like entity that emerges out of the mist for a day every now and again, because I've never spotted it.
Then again, perhaps familiarity would breed contempt. It's true that both Glasgow and Edinburgh have their fair share of high-end retailers, whether it's Harvey Nichols, Brooks Brothers, Mulberry, Ralph Lauren or Emporio Armani. And I can well remember the hullaballo that surrounded the arrival in Edinburgh of the first Gap store in the mid-1990s because it was deemed worthy of a news story and I had to write it. Doesn't seem like so much of a treat these days, does it?
Conversely I can remember my disappointment when I learned that Urban Outfitters was actually a chain and not just a stylish one-off on Buchanan Street in Glasgow. Perhaps where retailers are concerned we'll always live within a paradox – wanting everything everyone else has, while at the same time wanting what we do have to be ours and ours alone.
barry.didcock@heraldandtimes.co.uk
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