The Kate Moss shopping experience: queue jumping, hoop jumping and more

Now, let's get one thing straight. When I talk about the Kate Moss collection at Topshop, I'm not talking as a fashion expert. I'm not the one who queued for four hours in the sun. I'm not the one who was up til 1am blogging about it. I'm the one who popped in to the shop at 8.30pm yesterday, after a couple of glasses of wine, to see what all the fuss was about. And I left empty-handed and pissed off at Mr Phillip Green, and his assumption that women could be flogged anything if he attached a supermodel name to it.

I can't comment on the fashion merits of the collection (although to me it looked like a lot of vest tops and a few pairs of jeans - not exactly ground breaking) but I can comment on the experience I received. And it was ri-freakin'-diculous.

First up: getting into the 'Kate Moss area'. The collection is housed within some walls slightly to the left of the escalator. The first thing you'll notice is that they've put those annoying chains to create a snake-like queuing system in front of it. If you arrive at 8.30 at night, the second thing you'll notice is that there's no one queuing. But did they take the chains down? Did they heck. In fact, when I tried to enter through what was apparently the 'exit' side, I was told to turn around and weave my way through the entire (non-existent) queue to get to where I could legitimately enter (4 metres away from the exit). Thank god they had two security guards on duty to prevent such blatant flouting of the rules as I had tried to commit.

So, I was in. I was cross, but I was in. I proceeded to wander round, pick up a couple of likely looking t-shirts and attempt to try them on. As we've already established, there were very few people around at the time, and yet for some reason the sales assistant found some very pressing garments to hang up, before she could possible count the number of items I had and pass me a tag. It seemed she had been touched by the Supermodel Brush, including a feeling of disdain for her fellow humans, simply by working with the Kate Moss collection. Man, that stuff was *powerful*.

Two t-shirts later, both of which were slightly see-through and didn't fit properly, and I was ready to leave. So, out I headed in the direction I'd come. You'd think I'd have learnt, wouldn't you? I was immediately accosted by Supermodel Sales Assistant, who informed me that unfortunately I couldn't leave this way. So, where was it I was supposed to go, I queried. Why, back through the changing rooms, through a maze of fitting rooms to the 'Out' area. And so, off I trekked, back from whence I came. To arrive? About 4 metres from where the In area was. Fun.

So, my impression of the Topshop/Kate Moss experience: bland clothes, rude sales assistants, numerous hoops to jump through in order to have the pleasure of finding all this out.... It was, quite frankly, rubbish.

All this begged the question - does Phillip Green hate women? Does he regard us as drones who are willing to put up with anything if we can only get a bit of that model-like glamour to rub off on us? It seems so. And the sad thing? I'm pretty sure that the sales of the collection aren't be affected by the palaver that they're demanding customers go through. In fact, maybe it just adds to the magic of the collection - no pain, no gain, after all.

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