HIP store to close - what's next for these cornerstones of Northern fashion?

A couple of shop closures wouldn't normally trouble the top end of TheBusinessDesk.com news list, but the slow erasure of its non-core brands by JD Sports Fashion is pretty significant.

In one sense, it’s just two shops in the sprawling JD Sports retail empire that have been earmarked for closure, amongst 4,850 worldwide, but the likely closure of Hip Store appears to represent another break with JD’s street fashion heritage.

Under the brands section on the JD website the only UK brands now listed are JD, JD Gyms, size? and Footpatrol.

63 Thomas Street, which was once the home of the mothership, Oi Polloi, has been a Hip Store since 2023.

Now that too looks like it will go the same way as those other influential boutique northern retailers - Oi Polloi, Aspecto, Hurleys, Scotts, and Wade Smith - that either get bought up by the big guns, then slowly disappear, get sold in a game of retail pass the parcel, or retreat online, priced out of the city centres. Yet without them JD as it is today wouldn't exist.

I hope this creates an opportunity for something else genuinely fresh and in tune with how fashion is evolving in our northern cities.

My posting of the story on LinkedIn sparked a fascinating series of contributions from people far closer to the retail frontline than I.

Requires a follow up and a chat to Tim at This Thing of Ours, Jess at Hurleys, and the people behind Outsiders. 

Why Industry is the best thing on TV since Succession

Every once in a while a TV show comes along that smacks you in the face with its high stakes drama, sign of the times commentary, and it dares you to imagine how much further, which moral low point it could go to next.

It keeps popping up in meetings, usually an investment banker or lawyer saying - our culture is great, and nothing like that TV show they’re all watching. Yes, they mean Industry.

When it started in 2021 Industry was like a super charged version of the 90s coming of age drama This Life: edgy, zeitgeisty, young, sweary and tinged with darkness and foreboding. It also made superstars of Jack Davenport and Andrew Lincoln (though scandalously not Daniela Nardini).

But now that we’re on season four of Industry, all available on the BBC iPlayer, it seems more like that other, must-see, can’t look away, screen depiction of the worst excesses of capitalism - Succession. It also shares with that televisual masterpiece the accomplished feat of creating an entire cast of characters you never actually like very much. Each one comes coloured with different shades of dreadful, ever capable of ethical breaches, self serving greed and appalling morality.

Industry started by following the contrasting paths of a bunch of graduates embarking on life at fictional London investment bank Pierpoint. Pulsing with sexual tension and twisted manipulation, it quickly pivots around the twists and turns in the relationships between American CV forger Harper Stern (the actor known known mononymously as Myha’la), silver spooned international publishing heiress Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) and working class Robbie Spearing from a council estate in Hull (played by Harry Lawtey). Though a slow burner, it nonetheless earned Lawtey and Abela roles depicting Richard Burton and Amy Winehouse (as well as a BAFTA), and they won’t be the only talent propelled up the A list by this series.

It rubs against real events very tightly, post-COVID, the KamiKwazi budget, the 2024 election, and how that all rippled through the trading floors of the city. There’s real drama when they’re shorting the pound, or second guessing government policy - proving that markets can be moved and can topple governments.

So, yes I could sell it to you on the basis of the script, the realism, the glamour, the filthy language, and the acting - even, my fellow geeks, the accompanying music and the next level sound design - but as we’re up to season four now, the air is still thick with the same level of tension, action and intrigue, and the reason you have to delve in now is because it has suddenly got very Rainmakers adjacent.

Our very first piece on this platform was about the collapse of an African fintech app. Just saying. A recent episode, no spoilers, has such close parallels to the story about the German payments unicorn Wirecard that even the music overlaid one of the dramatic scenes was Forever Young by Alphaville, surely no coincidence that the name of the FT column in which Dan McCrum shattered Wirecard’s facade, amidst accusations he was colluding with short sellers, was Alphaville.

On our Rainmakers Substack we take you occasionally into the darker corners of mergers and acquisitions, sometimes murders and executions, and this should be a warning that due diligence, bold EBITDA forecast claims and family shareholder preference rights can and are the stuff of everyday life on the frontline of your world.

The experience of former bankers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, as Creators, Writers and Executive Producers carried the show so far, now a sprawling jungle is growing out of the vacillating reputations of the main protagonists. They also use their characters to propel forward the twisted plotlines with their own warps and flaws, there is never a sense that you are going to warm to them, to empathise, to get a deeper understanding of their motives and horrendous capacity to mess up.

No spoilers, but Down and Kay have said of this current season - “It was a fantastic and experiential precinct and gave the show it’s velocity and immersive feel, but we felt we could take that energy out into the world and broaden the canvas to deepen what the show was saying about capitalism and the feedback loop of finance, politics and media, while also introducing us to a broader array of characters.”

Adding: “We wanted the show to centre on a global story with more stakeholders.”

Yes, the media. There’s a journalist in season four, Jim Dycker, with a complex about Patrick Radden Keefe (we all have) as well as an unravelling dark back story. I liked his depiction because he’s significantly poorer than everyone else, he inhabits a shabby council flat and works for a niche title called FinDigest (I’m sure they were on the floor downstairs from us when I worked in the trade press in London).

It works because as the creators have said “people like watching people work” and you just don’t know where they’ll go next, it’s like the first show I’ve seen since Succession that I also can’t comfortably predict what any character is capable of doing next.

For a professional audience in a similar world, I can confidently say that the rigour the creators have applied isn’t just fun, but provocative and at times properly funny.

Even though we are now well into the fourth series, seriously, what else are you going to do?

So do it. Binge the lot, and do it now, it’s better than Night Manager and you could credibly make a case that watching it qualifies you for extra CPD points.

This scarf is a symbol of my own individuality and represents my belief in personal freedom

Everyone has a treasured item of clothing, a piece that they wear because it reminds them of someone or something, a time and a place.

This silk Paul Smith scarf, with green polka dots on a deep dark blue base is mine. I sometimes tell friends I call it my 'Mandelson scarf'. Not because he bought it for me or anything, or because it reminds me of a great day we spent together, but because it represents a symbol of my own personal resilience and my ability to shake off setbacks.

Part of my job when I worked at Manchester Metropolitan University was to find useful things for our then Chancellor to do, for it was he. I had initially been the conduit to approach him to meet with the VC and the Chair of Governors and accept the offer to become the Chancellor, a pro bono role, mainly ceremonial and ambassadorial.

At his installation ceremony, where I was tasked with making sure he turned up on time and knew who everyone was, I was mistakenly identified by the official photographer as his personal security detail when he asked me if I was ex-Army or ex-Police (I know, I look well hard don’t I?).

It was a new job and I had to carve out a place for myself in a sprawling organisation, not always successfully. 

Even though it was in my job description, slowly the responsibility for utilising the skills and connections of “Lord M” moved away from me. 

I wasn’t invited to the Chancellor’s Dinner in the summer, or involved in the Graduation ceremonies when he was present, and certainly didn’t go to Wuhan in China as part of the entourage when a deal was struck. 

Which brings me to the scarf. I’d been encouraged to go to the offices of Global Counsel and meet with Peter and his CEO. It was early in the job and I had high hopes for how we might work together, especially as I had some ideas about industrial policy that a former minister could input on.

The meeting didn’t go well. They didn’t seem to know I was coming, and seemed distracted and disinterested in me and what I had to say. I came away feeling that I’d made a fool of myself thinking I could move in these circles and be taken even vaguely seriously, that I was a lower league lightweight. I left feeling really flat and so went to the Paul Smith shop in Beak Street to buy myself something nice to cheer myself up, so that my trip to London wasn’t entirely wasted.

In the reset of my relationship, with a great bunch of colleagues, we set up MetroPolis, a think tank that was something of a forerunner in the education sector. It was designed to project policy relevant research work into the attention of policy makers. Part of the offer was a series of Chancellor’s Fellowships in his name, which connected academics to think tanks and government departments, and proved really effective when the university submitted its work for the REF assessment a few years later.

I wrote some speech notes for a HE conference, which seemed to go down well at the time. He also spoke at a couple of events under the MetroPolis banner, and always drew a big crowd, especially if we framed it as being about Brexit. 

One thing though, my colleagues in the comms team were always reluctant to promote his involvement, because he was such a controversy magnet. Understandable when your job is to protect the reputation of the University. 

At the outset I was genuinely quite excited about the potential and the prospects for a senior politician being involved. My day to day job often meant showing government ministers, local senior leaders and opposition politicians, what the university was doing. They included at different times Sajid Javid, Chris Skidmore, Margot James, Sam Gyimah, early meetings with elected Mayor Andy Burnham, all the local MPs, including Jonny Reynolds and Lucy Powell.   

The last event I was involved in with him was at the Manchester Tech Centre, where he was the warm up act for Andy Burnham, something the Mayor took great delight in reminding everyone how the roles were once reversed.

After I left in May 2021, (the picture is at my leaving drinks, wearing THAT SCARF), I got a very nice email from him telling me I’d done a good job for the university and wished me well. But we haven’t spoken since. I haven’t reached out, and though we were both at an event in 2022 and he saw me, he didn’t come and say hello.

I’m not writing this to distance myself from him any more, but to remind myself that although I sometimes allow people to assume I mixed in such circles, I don’t and I didn’t. It was also a realisation that at heart I’m a hack, a journalist, and simply don’t aspire to power and money. I mean, look where it gets you when you do.

But also, some people curl up in embarrassment after the revelations about people who they worked with who disgrace themselves. I have called this out and will continue to do so. Maybe they witnessed things where they turned a blind eye. In the case of the former Chancellor, I certainly don’t have any dirt I’m sitting on. None of us were aware that he was mates with the abuser, though everyone priced in his political reputation as a risk. Also, yes he was often imperious, and aloof, and distracted, but he was also charming when he wanted to be.

One of the most impressive, professional and courteous former leaders I met in the course of that job, and my next one, was Gordon Brown. My esteem for him has only grown over the years with everything he says and does.

The emails released this week appear to show the most shameful betrayal of the former Prime Minister, who has said he regards Mandelson’s disclosure of market sensitive and confidential government information to Jeffrey Epstein, “an inexcusable and unpatriotic act” at the time he was dealing with the global financial crisis that was damaging so many livelihoods.

I felt disappointed and deflated all those years ago, but nothing compared to the abject betrayal that Gordon Brown will be feeling now.