Fitch but they know it

It's a whole week since it opened, but I finally made it to the brand new "European flagship" Abercrombie & Fitch store on "Saville Row".

That last bit's in quotation marks because, despite "Saville Row" being splashed across all the (considerable) pre-opening advertising, the address and entrance are actually on Burlington Gardens, resulting in my initially walking straight past the damn place. The fact that there is no identifiable signage outside the building doesn't help, but there were perhaps other indicating factors that might have given it away had I been a little more alert...

You are greeted at the (huge, imposing) entrance by an actual bevy of "store models" (no mere "shop assistants" here), one of whom, a very young and very toned man, is naked to the waist, much like the young man whose equally muscled, unclothed chest is featured in oversized black & white photographic form along the wall behind him.

The models all smile brightly and greet you with a friendly "hi, how are you today?" – a habit that at first seems amiable enough but which rapidly, by dint of unavoidable repetition, becomes vaguely sinister. Who are these people? They're all so shiningly youthful it's like some kind of latter-day Logan's Run – they languish in every room, smiling and greeting, greeting and smiling. It's very un-British. None of them, it's probably worth noting, are wearing much in the way of clothing, which seems a little perverse for an actual clothes shop, though to be fair what they are wearing does indeed appear to be the stuff they're notionally selling, which is probably the general idea.

The interior, once you've circumvented the shop assistants lurking in every corner, is one of the most extraordinary retail spaces I've ever encountered. The whole place seems designed to completely disorientate the unwary shopper. You are plunged into darkness - a space almost entirely devoid of ambient light - and noise, sensory deprivation seeming to be a key aim here. Under the generic dance music - around 20% louder than that in your average Topshop of a Saturday afternoon - which fills a series of gloomy interlinking rooms, it's just possible to hear the squeals of the semi-hysterical Japanese teenagers streaming through them.

The elegantly plastered walls are painted a dark mushroom grey, on which are ranged floor-to-ceiling wooden bookcases. On these, in turn, are stacked piles and rows of beautifully arranged, colour-coordinated t-shirts, hotpants and vest tops, all of which are picked out reverentially by spotlights. The piles of shirts look more like a truncated pantone chart than actual clothes. I hardly dared at first so much as touch a t-shirt lest I disturb their fearful symmetry and – god forbid – actually give one of the assistants something to do apart from stand around dancing on the spot like fifteen year olds at a school disco.


Actually it's rather a magnificent building – the look they've gone for, as far as I can tell, is something along the lines of country mansion-meets-nightclub. The route to the women's section on the first floor takes in an imposing staircase, on which large painted panels depict athletic, in-no-way-homoerotic, young men striking classical poses with a variety of sporting equipment. The floors are black-stained parquet, the ceilings feature delicate plasterwork picked out in a tasteful shade of dove grey.

The clothes themselves are actually very ordinary. Red, pink, yellow, green, blue, beige, and everything emblazoned with the A&F name – how do some brands get away with turning their customers into walking advertisements, and when did A&F stop bothering to put cod-sporting logos on their (£30) t-shirts and (£70) hoodies?

Possibly I'm just too old for it all, but to be honest, if wholesome, colourful jerseyware is your kind of thing, you'll get more bang for your buck at American Apparel over the other side of Regent Street. But having said that, as the steady line of carrier bags (featuring the signature semi-naked torso motif) flowing back out into Burlington Gardens would seem to testify, the last thing Abercrombie & Fitch has ever been about is the gear.