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Topshop and Topman are back. On Saturday, the two brands — of which Topshop in particular was once emblematic of British high-low fashion cool — shut down London’s Trafalgar Square, staging a runway show followed by a party with London DJ duo Norman Jay and Melvo Baptiste on Notting Hill Carnival’s legendary Good Times bus, parked under Nelson’s Column.
Models — many of them open cast from a callout across the UK — strutted down the steps of the National Portrait Gallery as Cara Delevingne, Adwoa Aboah, Alva Claire and London mayor Sadiq Khan looked on from the front row. Members of the public could register for tickets, and even those without bustled at the barriers to catch a glimpse of the action. The see-now-buy-now Autumn/Winter 2025 collection was big on heavy outerwear, tailoring, shimmering eveningwear and denim (including the iconic Jamie and Joni jeans, which have been re-issued, IYKYK).
The event will mark Topshop’s highly anticipated comeback under new owner Heartland, the investment arm of Danish fashion retail group Bestseller. Ahead of the show, Topshop.com relaunched on Friday with a fresh editorial look and feel. (Topman now sits on the Topshop website, too.)
“The show and party allow us to re-engage with the Topshop and Topman community that we know [exists] from every interaction that we have on social media,” explained managing director Michelle Wilson over Zoom a couple of weeks out from the event. “The community is desperate to have Topshop and Topman back, and doing something public gives us a chance to celebrate.”
Once icons of the British high street, Topshop and Topman fell from grace when Philip Green’s Arcadia empire imploded in 2020. Asos acquired the brands in 2021, before selling a 75 per cent stake to Bestseller via Heartland last October. (The billionaire owner of Bestseller, Anders Povlsen, is Asos’s largest individual shareholder.) Wilson, formerly Asos chief of staff and strategy, was installed as managing director of Topshop and Topman in February, following the sale. She is now tasked with satisfying their legions of millennial fans, while enticing Gen Z shoppers, in a totally different retail landscape than back in the brand’s heyday.
The revamped Topshop homepage is topped with an image of its new (but not entirely new) ambassador Delevingne, with a campaign featuring the British model released in July. Delevingne worked with Topshop in its heyday, so felt like the perfect ambassador to spark nostalgia in former fans, according to Topshop and Topman chief marketing officer Moses Rashid, who joined the brand in February. (Rashid previously founded and led trainer marketplace The Edit Ldn, but exited the business after selling it to Brandalley in 2024.) Topshop’s teaser video for the show, featuring an interview with Jay, garnered eight million views and 102 press inclusions in seven days, according to Rashid.
“Topshop 2.0 feels raw, it feels unfiltered,” he says. “As a brand, it’s got the energy of ‘I’ll look you in the eyes and feel perfectly comfortable doing so’.”
Topshop will launch wholesale with an undisclosed UK retail partner at the end of the month. The brand will also have two stockists in the US and 24 across Europe and the rest of the world, Wilson says. People have been speculating about Topshop’s return to physical retail since the Heartland sale, but Wilson has nothing to announce for now. “There will definitely be physical retail for Topshop in the future,” she says. But for now, the focus is e-commerce and some wholesale partners “to get it in people’s hands again”.
Having fun and trying new things
So how will this next iteration of the brand compare to the Topshop we know and love?
For a start, the brand will no longer be aimed at young teens. “We may sit a little bit older than that now. It’s more for 18 to 40-somethings,” Wilson says. Boohoo, Pretty Little Thing and more recently Shein and Temu have captured this corner of the market with extremely low prices. “For the quality that we want to be able to put out, to be able to make clothes that are built to last, we can’t be in that age group’s sweet spot.”
This positioning chimes with analyst recommendations for the brand. “Fashion credibility has to be the focus rather than just the lowest price,” Adam Cochrane, general retail and luxury equity research analyst at Deutsche Bank, told Vogue Business last year following the news of the Heartland sale. “There are too many competitors at the low price point now.”
In the latter years of Topshop, before it was sold to Asos, fans of the brand called out a perceived decline in product quality. To address these concerns, Topshop has tapped Deanna Iannello, formerly product director of Asos’s more premium Asos Design range, for the same role. Iannello has come full circle, having started her career at Topshop in its early days.
“Topshop and Topman are smaller businesses now, which means smaller scale, so we’ve spent some time re-aligning our supplier base to work with partners matching our scale and quality requirements,” Wilson says. “Some we ve worked with for decades, some are newer. We’re working with the right suppliers and working with the right fabric.”
Topshop pioneered high-low fashion, collaborating with then-emerging London-based designers and creatives including Mary Katrantzou, Christopher Kane and Jonathan Saunders, as well as Kate Moss. Its premium line Topshop Unique was a frequent fixture on the London Fashion Week calendar from 2005 to 2018, where the front row often included the likes of Moss, Delevingine and Alexa Chung.
This is no longer a differentiator. Today, most high street players have collaborated with luxury labels and designers in some form. Asos hosted a London runway show in collaboration with Adidas at the beginning of July, while H&M is slated to show at London Fashion Week SS26 this September.
“Topshop was always built on the desire to have fun and try new things and to be a bit different. And a lot of that was around testing the boundaries between high fashion and mass fashion,” Rashid says. “So now we are thinking, how do we do that for 2025? How do we continue to do those things in a new way that excites customers, and that’s also really positive for the fashion industry?”
This will still come through in the form of collaborations, but with new or unexpected partners, including British cultural talents. “We’ve got an upcoming collection with a contemporary artist dropping in September for Topman; we’re headline sponsors for the Elle Style Awards [on 9 September]; and soon, we will announce a collaboration with an incredible, emerging designer, very culturally relevant, who’s certainly catching a lot of headlines at the moment,” Rashid shares, hinting at more announcements to come. “We’ve got some amazing things in the works.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
Update: This story was updated with details from the show (26/08/25, 21:00).
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