A Shop out of Time

M&S TIME WARP

I am not a Marks and Spencer kind of person.  Never have been.  We do go in there occasionally for food.  But if I was shopping for clothes it wouldn't be the first place I'd think of.  Or the second, third or tenth.  I don't pretend to be the snappiest of dressers - but M&S?  Please....

Yet the other day I found myself in an M&S Outlet store.  Only because Barbara wanted to go in and see what they had on offer, since the prices are a fair bit cheaper than in the normal stores.  To pass the time I had a wander around the men's clothing.  And, as I'd expected, found little to interest me.  I'm only a few months off turning sixty myself, but everything in there looked like it was aimed at old men, much older than me.  Or at younger men who are prematurely middle aged (Tories?).

No surprises then.  In fashion terms M&S looks locked into a bygone era.  But there's another reason, besides appearance, why it felt like going back a few decades.

I'm not especially tall, around six feet two.  However I am disproportionately short of torso, long of limb.  Gibbon like.  Thirty and more years ago getting sleeves that were long enough and, even trickier, jeans and trousers that didn't expose my ankles, wasn't straightforward.  I always had to shop around a lot.

As I've aged the problem has reduced greatly and finding the requisite leg length - thirty four inches - is simple enough.  Hell, even Primark have that as size 'long'.  Evolution has moved on and in today's generation my gangly build is far more commonplace, and the clothing racks reflect that change.

But not in M&S.  To this day it seems they still think 'long' equals thirty three inches. Or, as I like to think of it, far too bloody short.  Not only they do produce clothing that surely only the terminally conservative would want to wear, but they don't seem to have realised that shapes have changed too.  Didn't I hear they were losing business?  It's not hard to see why.

Oh, and Barbara, who has past the sixty mark, felt that most of the stuff she looked at was for old ladies who wanted to look like old ladies.  I don't think either of us are M&S kind of people....