Mary Portas' new book lifts lid on the 90s rebrand of Harvey Nicks
I Shop, Therefore I Am is a new book from TV’s queen of shops, which takes stock of her time rebranding the great British department store, and is filled with anecdotes of Cool Britannia, Princess Diana, Jennifer Saunders and more.
The 1990s was a boom time for British culture. New Labour swept away the cobwebs of Conservative rule in Downing Street, Britpop bands battled for supremacy at the top of the charts, and homegrown stars of the food, art and fashion scenes made London the epicentre of cool.
But nobody, it seemed, told the department stores. When the twentysomething Mary Portas arrived to revitalise Knightsbridge’s venerable Harvey Nichols, she found it fustier than a 1970s sitcom. By the end of the decade, under her take-no-nonsense direction, it was a different story.
Famous for its outrageous window displays by the likes of Thomas Heatherwick, and patronised by Princess Diana herself, ‘Harvey Nicks’ underwent a rebrand as exhaustively engineered as Cool Britannia.
How did Portas do it? Her tell-all account, I Shop, Therefore I Am: The '90s, Harvey Nicks – and Me, has all the answers, and then some.
These days, Portas is known for many things – she’s a broadcaster, author and brand advisor, among other roles – but not holding back. I Shop, Therefore I Am takes readers “behind the shop window”, dishing the dirt on Naomi Campbell’s timekeeping and Jennifer Saunders namechecking the store in Absolutely Fabulous, one of the most iconic TV shows of the era.
Portas, it seems, was born to do this. Her first Saturday job was at a Watford bread shop, and she worked in John Lewis for a day before declaring herself bored and leaving. When she joined Harvey Nichols, “I felt I was coming home,” she told the Guardian. “You’d walk in, in the morning, and the women on the makeup counter would be getting ready. ‘Look at this’, ‘The new Dior lipstick’s come out’. You talk to them, then you go up to the next floor and see the buyers flitting around, then the homeware. It was exciting. It was alive!”
Fittingly, I Shop Therefore I Am arrives laden with praise from pioneering woman as diverse as Ab Fab star Joanna Lumley and activist Scarlett Curtis, and has drawn comparisons to everything from The Devil Wears Prada to Adam Kay’s NHS expose This Is Going to Hurt.
But this is as much a personal journey as a polemic. “These were the years of learning, discovery and of course the defining era of the 1990s,” Portas writes. “The kind of magic we created, the chaos we danced through, the lessons we learned (and unlearned)… they still matter. Maybe even more so now. So I wrote it all down. Not just the glossy highlights, but the grit, the joy, the madness, the vulnerability and the heart.”
- I Shop, Therefore I Am: The '90s, Harvey Nicks – and Me by Mary Portas is out on 2 October, published by Canongate.
Matt Glasby is an entertainment journalist and author. His work has appeared in GQ, Empire and Radio Times, among others, and his books include Britpop Cinema: From Trainspotting to This Is England.
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