It’s 10.30 on a grey London morning in 1992, and two women are speeding towards Knightsbridge in a black Jaguar XJ6. “You going straight to the office? Past Harvey Nicks?” asks magazine editor Patsy Stone, exhaling cigarette smoke. “Could we? It is nearly lunchtime.” Her publicist best friend Edina Monsoon – hungover, and organising a fashion show that evening – doesn’t take much persuading. “Well look, we can do Harvey Nichols quickly.”
Like many an SW1 woman in the 1990s, the champagne-swilling, Lacroix-wearing protagonists of Absolutely Fabulous were powerless to resist Harvey Nichols, the slick, seven-storey fashion emporium that anchors Sloane Street. (Monsoon was said to be based on Lynne Franks, who managed PR for Harvey Nichols.) Less fusty than Harrods, more polished than Selfridges, Diana, Princess of Wales’s favourite store was synonymous with cutting-edge style. It fostered design talent and hosted fashion shows for up-and-coming designers, stocking collections by Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen alongside big names such as Donna Karan and Vivienne Westwood. Its fifth-floor restaurant boasted the first sushi conveyor belt in London outside of the Harvey Nichols-owned OXO Tower restaurant and a state-of-the-art coffee bar. Its top-floor champagne bar had a direct lift and 3am alcohol licence. So striking were its window displays – think dinosaurs made out of coat hangers – that sightseeing tour companies organised their bus schedules around them.
But that was then. Against a lacklustre retail backdrop, and the subsequent boom (and bust) of luxury ecommerce outposts Net-A-Porter and Matches, the department store’s nearly 200-year-old lustre has long faded. Unable to compete with Harrods’ grip on luxury brands thanks to its shop-in-shop boutique approach, and Selfridges’ rotating cast of madcap instore events and entertaining offshoots (an emerald-green boating lake on its roof, a cinema), Harvey Nichols has struggled to keep up. The pandemic hit hard, with pretax losses more than doubling to £39.6mn from £16.3mn in the year to March 2021. Its losses narrowed in 2023, but it still reported a £21.3mn loss and cut around five per cent of its workforce in 2024. In March, it will close its Landmark store in Hong Kong after nearly 20 years of trading.
If newish CEO Julia Goddard is daunted by the turnaround task at hand, she doesn’t show it. Blonde and smiley, dressed in a pink orchid intarsia McQueen sweater, Goddard has just landed on the red-eye from Dubai – in addition to Knightsbridge and six other stores in the UK and Ireland, plus a beauty store in Liverpool, Harvey Nichols operates a store in the emirate, in addition to Riyadh, Kuwait, Doha and Hong Kong – but is sparky as she sips a coffee on a red-velvet banquette in the fifth-floor bar.
“I am non-stop energy, basically!” laughs the former regional president at McQueen. “I love a challenge, fixing problems. There’s a huge amount to do at Harvey Nichols to bring it back to where it was. But it’s not like I’m trying to create something out of nothing. It’s already there. It’s just a question of raising the bar.” She’s flanked by buyer Kate Benson, a Net-A-Porter alum and freshly installed chief merchant, and Kate Phelan, British Vogue’s veteran fashion director, now creative director. Benson, who left her role at Net-A-Porter the previous Thursday and started at Harvey Nichols on Friday, happens to be Goddard’s sister. “That’s why I could tell her: ‘You’re not taking a day off in between. Because we have orders to confirm!’”
All have fond memories of Harvey Nichols in its heyday. Goddard and Benson were regulars with their “shopaholic” mother, later coming to the bar on nights out. Phelan recalls purchasing an electric-blue Jean Paul Gaultier skirt suit for her first round of international fashion shows as a fashion editor at Marie Claire, as well as the parties: “Everybody always had fun here. It was a real heady time.” Adds Goddard: “We all know the potential of it. That’s what our mission is – to bring back that amazing spirit and light and excitement to the store that we all remember.”
The trio sees Harvey Nichols’ diminutive size as its strength. At 35,000sq m stocked with more than 350 fashion brands, it is dwarfed by Harrods’ 110,000, and Selfridges’ 80,000, but can offer a curated edit that could feel more manageable for customers who are, as Goddard puts it, “sick of scrolling”. Says Benson: “I think that does allow us to have a more singular, more authoritative point of view. Our challenge is to bridge that gap between specialist boutique and department store.” Dries Van Noten, Khaite and Chloé are all strong performers currently, with Chloé’s knee-high Eve boots and Khaite’s cropped leather Kember jacket flying off racks, along with Toteme cardigans and slouchy Citizens of Humanity jeans.
Julia Sawalha, Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley in Absolutely Fabulous
Diana, Princess of Wales, leaving the restaurant in September 1994
But all three women know a sense of “discovery” – retail speak for uncovering new, lesser-known labels – will be key. Benson is reticent on brand names as contracts are currently in negotiation (some will operate on a concession model), but she confides she is a fan of Róhe, the Amsterdam-based label that’s gaining ground. “Women are crying out to discover something that they haven’t already seen. We’re bombarded with so much information; we’ve taken all the fun, the pleasure, out of shopping,” says Phelan. The website will continue to be a key platform, but Goddard wants to recapture the local west London woman: “This is fundamentally about a local British customer. Of course, we would love to see all the internationals as well, but we’re a British brand.”
Step one includes resetting the brand perception. “It’s been treated like a store. We need to start treating it like a brand,” asserts Goddard. A new campaign will launch in February. Overseen by Phelan, who is feeling “fatigued by fashion photography”, the store windows, website interface, shopping bags and accompanying advertising on black taxis and red buses will feature animated fashion illustrations of key catwalk looks by the illustrator Jacky Marshall. Over the next 12 to 18 months, floorplans will be reorganised, the assortment of brands will be honed, visual merchandising will be souped up, the currently empty restaurant space where Diana had a regular lunch table will be revived. A new VP of retail, Nino Mzhavia, will be tasked with improving the client experience, empowering sales associates to advise on everything from an outfit for a night out to perfume purchases. On that note, Goddard also plans to tackle the pricing architecture. “We want to create this blend of products [that are] luxurious and fashionable but also accessible. You don’t have to be a gazillionaire to come into Harvey Nichols. You can come in and get a lipstick or a blowdry and still have a great time.”
Dickson Poon, the Hong Kong-based retail magnate and Harvey Nichols chairman and owner, has committed an additional £25.5mn to the business. Poon has form: in 1991 he spotted the potential of the past-its-prime department store that began life as a family-owned linen shop, bought it off Burton Group, and hired a crack team of Amanda Verdan as fashion director and Patrick Hanley as commercial director. He also elevated Mary Portas, the spunky visual merchandiser brought in by his predecessor, to help him place the store at the centre of the zeitgeist – and turn a profit.
Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney at the restaurant in late 2002
The Christmas window display in 1991
It was Portas who gave Jennifer Saunders access to the store and its clothing racks for Absolutely Fabulous, commissioned Thomas Heatherwick to create avant-garde window displays, and facilitated a 1995 British Vogue shoot with Nick Knight photographing Linda Evangelista in the spring collections in the store windows, witnessed by frenzied onlookers. She also organised New-Gen fashion shows for emerging designers at London Fashion Week. The store became known for stocking young talents you couldn’t buy elsewhere. As Matthew Williamson recalls: “In 1997, I did my first show, Electric Angels. The next day we had an order from Harvey Nichols – and where Harvey Nichols led, everyone else followed.”
“When I went into it, it was a loss-making, fusty, slightly old-fashioned store, and we turned it around into an innovative, leading, creative, cultural destination,” says Portas, who is writing a book about her Harvey Nichols years titled I Shop Therefore I Am: The ’90s, Harvey Nicks – and Me. “It felt like it was a home for this crazy cultural Britishness. It was groundbreaking.”
At 12.30 on a recent Wednesday afternoon – typically known as a “power hour” in department stores – the store was noticeably quiet. The top-floor restaurant had empty tables and all the ambience of an airport terminal. There was certainly no sign of David Beckham wandering around looking for women’s pyjamas, as Sarah Harris, editor-at-large at British Vogue and a former Harvey Nichols Saturday girl, recalls witnessing on one weekend shift. Still a regular, Harris recently stopped by to purchase a Maison Margiela trench coat. “I love how easy it is to navigate, it isn’t overwhelming,” she says.
Harris is convinced that a fresh mix of brands, original merchandising, passionate salespeople who know their customer and a beauty overhaul can bring loyalists back. Portas, too, puts the emphasis on people. “For many retailers, the operational side overtook the experience. But it’s also about having a place that is joyful and connects emotionally. You have to identify what that new magnetism is.”
