Shopping

The staff canteen

The walk takes us into the enormous, brilliantly lit beauty hall, which stocks around 100 brands. Twelve of these – Bobbi Brown and Mac among them – are ‘number one brands’, which means they take more money here than in any of their other concessions around the world. Selfridges is extremely cagey about sales figures, but I hear on the grapevine that brands with a large counter presence, such as Mac, take around £9,000 every day.

Next door is the accessories hall. The most money per square foot is made in here. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise given that you can buy a Vertu mobile phone for £24,000. Brands move around here according to whether they’re ‘on trend’ or not. Mini-boutiques are reserved for the season’s most ‘now’ brands: Miu Miu and Chloé have both recently earned their own shop-within-a-shop. The easternmost double doors out to Oxford Street, by the Louis Vuitton concession, earn the accolade ‘busiest doorway in Europe’, siphoning 250,000 people a week. Feature continues

Before opening time on the first day of the sales, these same doors have 5,000 handbag aficionados queueing outside them. Despite the conspicuous luxury on offer in the accessories hall, Selfridges has widened its customer base in recent years. While some might come to buy the world’s most expensive sandwich (two or three people a day purchase the £85 Wagyu beef, Brie de Meaux, foie gras and black truffle mayonnaise sandwich extravaganza from the food hall), anyone walking through Selfridges’ doors also feels welcome enough to simply browse. As Mann says, echoing Alannah Weston’s personal mission statement, ‘Where else can you buy a Topshop top and a Lanvin dress?’

The grand atrium today

Lanvin dresses, in case you’re interested, are in the new ‘Designer Room’ for women on the third floor (the high-street brands have their own section, Spirit, on the ground floor). Head of fashion Anna Garner and her frighteningly immaculate team have created this new space to showcase the ‘best of the best’ each season. It’s not all about the big names; they’re also keen to ‘grow’ lesser-known, emerging brands and London-based designers – symbolised by the white cast of a hornbeam tree that’s the room’s focal point. It’s here that some of the building’s art deco features have been carefully reinstated, from cornicing on the ceiling to the French handblocked wallpaper wrapped around the till points. Behind it, the original high windows facing Oxford Street have been uncovered, letting in that rare thing in a department store, natural light. Money is also being poured into men’s fashion.

Head of menswear, the very dapper David Walker Smith, is one of the longest-serving members of staff I meet (many seem to have more or less coincided with Weston’s arrival) and he has been nurturing the fortunes of menswear for nine years. He talks in terms of the ‘theatre of retail’ – rather like a chip off the old Gordon Selfridge block. His Superbrands room is a homage to the beautiful game, with grass-green detail and rails suspended from the ceiling, bringing to mind table-football players.