After spending a rainy London Saturday morning walking around Portobello market filled with tourists admiring the vintage bargains, my lovely American friend, Kate and I decided to have a look for a nice Maxi Dress and some day shoes (see what 3 days of British sunshine does to us?!) on Oxford Street. Obviously we knew what would be happening on March 26th but we hadn’t quite anticipated the enormity and liberating atmosphere that welcomed us.
By 3pm, around 25% of the stores that we walked past had been closed due to damage or disturbance including Boots, Fortnum & Mason, Topshop, Dorothy Perkins, Aquascutum, Desigual, Apple, Benetton, H&M, BHS and Marks & Spencer with Topshop staff and customers being pelted with Paint, as a Topshop staff member told me after being evacuated from the store.
As you can see from the video, the High Street fashion multiples took a hard punch from today’s protests and as I type this, it carries on. I can’t help feeling disappointed in the High Street’s executives for allowing their businesses to take the hit for their financial issues. If they came forth and honestly defended their actions, it would not only restore some confidence in one of the UK’s biggest industries but motivate the public to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and drag ourselves out of this economic mess by supporting our own economy! On the other hand, the protesters did not seem to have much of a united goal apart from simply protesting. It felt more like a Jubilee street party with a twist (the twist being Riot Police and smoke bombs!) than a revolutionary stand.
Job cuts have happened in ALL industries and if we’re all going to target London Fashion, we might as well just is shoot ourselves in the feet.
Montage Video created by Ashley London
Actual Footage taken by Ashley London 26th March 2011
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