SINGAPORE: With fashion retailers like Topshop, Warehouse and River Island occupying huge, double-storey spaces along London’s most important shopping streets, with ever-changing window displays plugging the big trends that week, fast fashion is big business in the UK.

One of the swiftest among these sartorial speedsters: Forty-year-old British retail chain New Look, which made its debut in the Far East last Saturday, with the soft opening of its 8,000-sq-ft duplex store at ION Orchard.

In London, a week prior to New Look’s ION store opening, where I checked out a few of the brand’s approximately 600 UK outlets, I got some impressive numbers from its international retail operations manager, Mark Eve.

Across New Look stores in the UK, stocks are updated daily (in Singapore, this rate will be a slightly slower but still impressive two to three times a week), and items typically do not stay in stores for more than five weeks.

As with many other high-street retailers, New Look has had its share of celebrity collaborations over the years. Of-the-moment personalities such as Agyness Deyn, Pixie Geldof and Alexa Chung have fronted its campaigns, while singer Lily Allen also took on designing duties for a capsule collection back in 2007. Two years ago, the brand also launched Gold by Giles, an ongoing partnership with one of our favourite British designers, Giles Deacon.

It is not just its responsiveness to style trends that has made New Look one of the biggest fashion retailers in the UK — 38 per cent of the British female population have purchased an item from the company in the past year — but also, its relatively low prices.

At the ION store — which stocks New Look’s women’s clothing, shoes, and accessories, as well as its early-teen-targeted Generation 915 line — prices start at S$9.90 and generally do not go beyond S$100.

This means we see no earthly reason not to stock up on pieces from the current summer collections, which feature plenty of nautical, folkloric and rock-ish elements.

To get you started, we’ve picked a few of our favourite pieces. And remember: In the world of fast fashion, you’ve got to get them soon — or they’ll be gone.


- TODAY/ yt