July 8, 2012 |
I know exactly what it’s like working in a shop because I’ve done it – years ago. Here’s a tale of a few wonderful characters who work in shops now. Some names have been changed for obvious reasons. “Shoppies” are worse than hairdressers, and hairdressers are bad. All the below is absolutely true.
Long before the rise of the internet, in the early 1990s, department stores were the best places to find designer labels for men. Boutiques were around, of course, but shiny stores, with chrome and white fixtures, were chock-a-block with European brands and plenty of good-looking, well-dressed gay boys there to serve you. Working in a shop was chic. You went clubbing and then got up the next morning.
During the long, drawn-out afternoons, Jason (not his real name), all Hermès neck scarf, Jean Paul Gaultier tattoo-print top and Gucci clogs, used to turn tricks. That’s tricks, as in sexual favours with men, right in that little gap behind the changing rooms where the cleaner kept her mop. You could, at a push, get up to three people round the back there and go undetected, as long as you didn’t make too much noise. Jason has never said whether he accepted cash for his favours, but he definitely got “plenty of cock”.
These days, Jason works on the make-up floor, his older face now made angular by means of shading: concealer, powder and highlighters. He’s art and artist and wildly feted for his ability to turn frumpy hausfraus into milfy mutton. Jason is a top-ranking Perfume Fag and puts his middle-aged paunch down to “eating his own emotions” – something he heard Oprah say once and “really understood what she meant”.
Jason tells us (and we’re not sure if he’s making this up, as he does have a tendency to lie quite a lot, an example being when he told us that the actress Una Stubbs did a massive poo in a handbag in a changing room once and just left it there) that, one Friday night – ooh, must have been 12 years ago – he bumped into a famous American Olympic hurdler who gave him “the glad eye” just outside Madame Jojo’s in London’s Soho. Within 15 minutes, the two of them were involved in various sporting events in the hurdler’s hotel room. Jason left there at 9am the next morning, “walking like John Wayne and with a hangover of medieval proportions”.
If asked what he wants most in life, Jason will scream “More holes!” and then snort with laughter. He’d normally try to raise an eyebrow, too, but has recently surrendered all muscle control to Dr Prager’s 15-gauge needle.
Next floor up: fashion!
Céline, Marc, McCartney – buyers’ decisions based on millions of pounds dangle on a dust-free shop floor; beaded this and wrinkle-free that and this one has real gold thread.
Superior fags rule here: it’s the way into glamour they always dreamed of. The fashion floor’s Thin Tim moves from one fixture of designer frocks to another, as if on well-oiled castors, and has some brilliant tales of serving Shirley Bassey and Dame Judi Dench, the “nightmare” that is Cilla Black and his favourite, Isabella Blow, who, “never bothered with a changing room back in the day and just got naked on the shop floor in front of everybody”.
When Thin Tim was really thin, when he went to that rundown comprehensive just outside Hull, the visiting careers officer said: “What would you like to be when you leave school? It says here you like drawing and art and cookery – how about a career down the mines? There’s money to be made in muck, young man.” But Thin Tim winced and thought about running home to watch his Dynasty box set and devour those rag-eared fashion mags his mum had pilfered from the dentist’s.
Thin Tim pats clothes and dresses minor TV personalities: Denise van Outen bought this same Givenchy coat in grey, he says, “and looked fucking appalling in it”. Tim hasn’t really eaten a solid meal since 2003 and survives on carrot sticks, muesli and pickled onion Monster Munch. “Even the cheapest trouser looks perfectly cut over a wiry frame,” he says.
Over in the personal shopping department, Joan Collins – and this is a fact – once got trapped in the loo, but luckily saw the funny side if it. The personal shopping manager – or Camp Tony, as we’ll call him, because he looks a bit like the now-dead but brilliantly talented Birmingham-based house DJ Tony de Vit – runs a tight ship and can often be found scoffing biscuits from a tin marked “customers only”. “Just one more and I’ll have a walk round the floor. It pays to look busy,” he says.
A trick perfected long ago by Tony would, in any other business outside the protective white walls (with wall-mounted TV) of personal shopping, be considered fraud. But, after 17 years of “outstanding service” and a “very special friendship” with Queen Rania of Jordan, Camp Tony is, well, untouchable.
One massages the weekly accounts thus, explains Tony after a couple of rum and Diet Cokes… At the end of every week, sometimes, when the figures are punched in the system, Camp Tony’s takings aren’t what they should be. No bother. Camp Tony simply takes his credit card and buys a MaxMara trouser suit and coat, taking him just above his target. If the target is met every week, Tony and his team will receive their annual bonus.
Come Monday morning, Camp Tony will refund his card the full amount and they’ll start the week again. Now, Camp Tony is fully aware his takings are £1,125 down because of the earlier refund, but that’s when this clever dealer phones one of his addicts. Mrs Green has recently remortgaged the house her mother left her to pay for her fondness for Marc Jacobs. And because Mrs Green is secretly in Iove with Camp Tony, and her husband Derek is having an affair with a young blonde named Debbie, she’ll buy anything he says – absolutely anything. Camp Tony calls Mrs Green and sweet-talks her into a £4,759 Marc Jacobs coat she’ll take without even seeing – and all this by 9.17am Monday morning. Now Camp Tony’s figures for the week look exceedingly promising.
As head office maintains: “Good old Tony runs a tight ship – good, old, honest Tony.“ Tony’s slick deception is matched only by our next character’s skill with a Rootstein mannequin.
Since graduating from the now-defunct Essex College of Display and Interior Design in 1982, the store’s window department has been expertly minced over by Her Royal Highness Julian Display. A pager away from any emergency frock removal, Julian is ruling mother of the house and legendary in the world of windows and visual merchandising. Retail Week have named him Display Person of the Year twice, once in 1999 for his Millennium Maze windows, a scheme of silver unicorns battling various nymphs all wearing Alexander McQueen, and more recently, for the London (F)rocks installation just outside the Dries Van Noten boutique, which had a live tableau with Joanna Lumley, lying on a chaise longue, reciting poems in various new-season outfits, a photo of which made the Evening Standard’s front page and is framed in his mother Barbara’s mock-Georgian lean-to just outside Staines.
Julian is always chewing mints in a poor attempt to disguise the stench of his chronic alcoholism. “Gin will be the ruination of me,” he is often heard saying. At the one-before-last Retail Display and International Mannequin get-together at the Alhambra Conference Centre in Bradford, Julian got so heroically drunk he fell into the rotisserie, causing his mohawk to catch fire and for him to be hospitalised with concussion. This was passed off by his loyal staff as one of his “dizzy spells”, which generally occur during staff outings and/or bank-holiday weekends.
“They call this place the velvet coffin,” he says and points around the store. “It’s comfortable, but once you’re here, you’ll never get out again – happy shopping!”
Image Courtesy: All Star
by Richard Gray
