For my 13th birthday in the 1990s, all I dreamed about was a denim button-up dress from River Island worn over an oatmeal bodysuit.
Oatmeal – the height of sophistication! Not boring school shirt-white, not bland-old beige – but oatmeal. Slightly ribbed, with minute white flecks like a speckled egg. If I only had that bodysuit, I’d look exactly like Nicole Appleton from All Saints – I just knew it.
I could wear it, I fancied, to attract boys like Justin Peterson in the year above me, whose name I used to write in my diary – over and over – with my special glittery pen with the pom-pom on the top. One look at my River Island denim dress with the iridescent shell pop buttons and he’d be mine. How could he resist?
And if he wasn’t sure, I had a secret weapon: shimmer pink lipstick with dark brown lipliner and a silver puffa jacket. Phwoar. (Spoiler: he wasn’t mine, and I never forgave my friend Gemma for wearing an even better denim dress with a maroon body-suit beneath it, from Tammy Girl.)
Now, perhaps you can understand my heartbreak, because rumour has it that River Island – bastion of bucket hats, purveyor of crop tops, combat trousers and woven belts, stalwart of satin slip dresses and velvet chokers with a small silver cross dangling from the middle – could collapse within weeks, following £33m losses.
According to The Telegraph, the beloved retailer will go unless landlords and creditors approve a radical rescue plan – due to be put before the High Court next week – which would see 33 stores close, rents slashed on a further 71 shops and debts written off.
If the rescue plan works, then an emergency loan from River Island’s founders might just save it. If not, it’ll close by August. And not only would the closures be devastating for those who work there – River Island employs 5,300 people in its various stores, plus a further 950 at its head office in Hanger Lane – but it would decimate one of the last faded giants of 1990s nostalgia.
Be still, my beating heart that pumps in time to “Pure Shores” – they cannot do this to us, they cannot. If River Island goes, it will join the ghosts of Topshop, Miss Selfridge, Morgan de toi and Jane Norman. And where will we get our crushed velvet dresses and cami tops, then?
I put an urgent callout to the friends who dressed as badly in the Nineties as I did, to see what they’d miss most about the retail chain if it went under.
“For me, River Island was all about the store in Ilford Exchange. It was the first shop where I felt like a grown-up,” Roz admitted. “Prior to that, it was all about going into C&A – in the Clockhouse section – and Tammy Girl. But shopping in River Island in Ilford felt like I’d graduated to a higher level.
“The plastic bags were coveted because they were so iconic – multi-coloured, floral – if you had something in a River Island bag, you were the height of chic. It’s where I bought my favourite item of clothing that decade – a pair of oatmeal linen trousers, which I obviously wore with a body. Plus, they had really, really good accessories.”
“This isn’t directly related, but I remember fondly the store at Oxford Circus,” Emma told me. “It was pretty much opposite Aroma [a popular coffee shop chain in the 1990s] where we’d meet in the downstairs area and smoke ciggies and drink coffee and then shop at River Island and feel very grown-up and like we had found life.”
While Louise said: “You were literally s*** hot if you had a bag from River Island. I used to go shopping there for chunky belts, vest tops, crushed velvet and cargo trousers, like All Saints, which we’d wear with Timberland boots, obviously. I think glitter makeup was just starting. And, if we were going “out out”, it’d be asymmetric skirts and tops with chunky necklaces.”
One of my colleagues at The Independent (who’s asked to remain nameless), meanwhile, shared his fond experiences of working in River Island menswear. “On my first day, the pregnant manager, who interviewed me and offered me the role, was marched out by police in handcuffs for stealing jeans,” he reminisced.
“I got paid £4.35 an hour and used to hide in the stockroom and drink vodka and orange with the 30-year-old managers who I genuinely thought were the coolest people alive. Skinny jeans and really pointy brogues, Scouting for Girls on loop all day... There was loads of shagging going on, too, in the stockroom.”
But when I ask my teenage daughter if she ever shops in River Island when she goes to Westfield with her mates, she actually stops and stares at me with what looks a lot like... horror. “No, Mummy. As if I go to River Island. That’s for old people – like you. Or Nanny.”
Sigh. Kids today have no taste. Let’s just hope the rescue plan works. They can take River Island – but they’ll never take the memory of our 1990s fashion disasters.
