Retail comfort

When you open the door to a changing room in a clothes shop the last thing you expect to see is a fully made-up bed.

In a fully furnished bedroom.





This haven for weary shoppers is Jack Wills, in Edinburgh's George Street. In the British class system which still seems alive and well, the clothes of this brand are associated with well-off, upper class university students, not least by the company's own advertising. Think rowing sweatpants, padded gilets, checked shirts, retro woolies. While there is a certain clumping of the brand in this sector of the population, the appeal seems broader than that. My daughter is now a university student, but I wouldn't put us in the well-off, upper-class bracket. How comforting it is in Britain to know exactly where you come in the social scale. (Should I have a little pop-up here to say 'irony intended'?) It should be said that well-off and upper-class don't always go together, so it's less of a scale than a complex matrix.

I know that the price of the clothes (ouch!) is paying for the sumptuous changing rooms, but there is a certain relief to encounter a bed while accompanying an about-to-be student on a big pre-university shopping expedition. And yes, of course I lay down on it. Apart from the price tag at the end, I wish all retail experiences could be like this.