Mary Portas: My Ab Fab memories of the hedonistic Nineties

When Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley descended on Harvey Nichols out of hours to film the first Absolutely Fabulous in the early Nineties, Mary Portas, the marketing guru who had fixed the TV setting, knew she was taking a huge risk.

Her decision could go either way. She could get free marketing for the store through the new BBC show, attracting masses of curious customers, or it could become the unfortunate butt of every fashion-induced joke – not cool.

“I really didn’t sleep. I just had this feeling they were going to put a store in as the store you go to. I knew they were dropping names of designers. I thought, if they name drop a store I want it to be ours. I couldn’t bear the thought it could be another one.

“The risk was it could have been a send up, a laugh at, and because I was unable to see the script, quite rightly, I did take that responsibility.”

She needn’t have worried. Within weeks of Ab Fab airing in 1992, ‘Harvey Nicks’ was teeming with mothers and their teenage daughters eager to see what all the glorious fuss was about.

“Ab Fab then went global, so you had all the international people wanting to see the store that they went to. A lot of international money suddenly came in, but it brought the younger market in as well and they became lifers because it was just joyous.

“And the more that Ab Fab became famous, the more we did.”

‘Harvey Nicks’ became a character itself and helped Portas and her team take it from faded to high fashion in five years.

“You have those times in your life, those turning points,” says the retail guru, author, TV star and marketer, who charts her career in the mad, materialistic world of the Nineties in her new memoir, I Shop, Therefore I Am.

Portas, 65, says she already has nine production companies pitching for the rights to a TV adaptation, plus a scriptwriter in place.

She was the creative brain behind the eye-popping window displays, from newspaper seascapes to the stark ‘Carhenge’, featuring mannequins draped over junkyard Chevrolets.

A creative with seemingly endless flair, she launched the ‘New Generation’ designers at the store and dealt with all the flashy smiles and splashy budgets in an alpha male-dominated environment.

In 1996 she oversaw the launch of Harvey Nichols in Leeds, where half the people queuing up to enter were dressed as Edina and Patsy.

“They were crazy days. It was a really cultural time of the Nineties, of the music, of an era when something very different was happening, with New Labour coming in. It was written at its peak of cultural resonance,” she remembers.

“It was a magnetic time and we took risks – and those risks worked.”

Is the fashion industry of the Ab Fab days, the snobbery, the hierarchy, the mad spending, the excess, still the same?

“Pre-Covid, I would have said that I think the fashion industry hasn’t changed and it’s the designer labels that set the catwalk everybody wants to aspire to. Then you get the rip offs on the high street and the poorer value retailers who are ripping off the high street.

“A couple of things have happened. One is that people are saying, ‘No! I just know that spending money like that is not the best use of my money’. We are in a financial crisis. Money is ridiculously tight for so many people.

“Two, buying lots of stuff and boasting about it is seen as terribly bad taste. Culturally it’s just not where we’re meant to be anymore.

“Three is conscience [when it comes to] Mother Earth and a whole generation of young – and older – people going, ‘You know what? Wearing vintage and second-hand is now sexy.’”

Throughout it all, through the years when she sported her iconic red bob – which has been replaced with softer, wispy blonde highlights – and talked hard in her retail makeover TV show Mary Queen Of Shops, advised the then Prime Minister David Cameron on how to save the high street and forged ahead in other avenues of her business career, she has retained a steely determination and incredible resilience.

She knows that her upbringing in Watford, in a noisy household as the fourth of five children, had a lot to do with it.

Portas’ mother died suddenly when she was 16 and the young Mary effectively took over the running of the family home, with the older children gone and her father unable to cope with the grief.

Eighteen months later, he remarried and then died of a heart attack nine months later. Her stepmother inherited everything and Mary and her younger brother, Lawrence, then 16, were taken in by her parents’ friends, but looking after him and not being able to afford to live in London meant she had to turn down a place at RADA.

There was no therapy, just a feeling that she had to survive, stay in control.

“When you have no one, you turn inwards. You have to generate your own self-belief,” she writes.

Today, she has two grown-up children, Mylo and Verity, with her ex-husband Graham Portas, and a 13-year-old son, Horatio, who she co-parents with her ex-wife, journalist Melanie Rickey.

Covid was a particularly low point in her life, she confesses, both professionally – at her brand consultancy Portas – and personally.

“I turned 60. I was going through a big divorce. It hit my business and everything I did for brands. Every retail brand stopped any marketing or branding. It was a really tough time.”

She recognised that the only way people could get through it, moving forward, was to ask what they actually want (in life) and what they have learned and to build communities and civic pride.

“That is becoming the next shift. We are understanding the importance of social infrastructures and connections.”

Her company now advises companies on how they can transform their behaviours to better impact the world and humanity, and give everyone a better future, to do less bad and add more good.

She’ll be doing a book tour, but isn’t worried about going out to buy anything new.

“I went through my wardrobe with a great friend of mine and I repurposed everything, just pulled out things I could wear on this tour which meant I didn’t have to buy anything new. That’s a fundamental change.”

She lives in London but escapes to her house in the Cotswolds when she can, where she enjoys family gatherings at Christmas and weekends, walking and pottering in her vegetable garden.

For the last few years, Portas has been beavering away trying to turn that former madly materialistic consumerism attitude into a healthier one, promoting the shopping experience as one of community, of ethics, of considered purchases, thinking of the environmental impact, looking out for small shopkeepers, and her thoughts are featured in the book’s epilogue.

She’s a great proponent of a ‘kindness economy’ and in 2009 set up the first of more than 20 Mary’s Living & Giving charity shops, which have raised £32 million for Save the Children.

Does she regret those hedonistic Nineties days when she fervently promoted consumerism?

“We didn’t know what we were doing,” she says frankly. “Did we know that we were creating a consumerism that would affect our Mother Earth? Now we do know and we have a conscience.”

I Shop, Therefore I Am: The ‘90s, Harvey Nicks, And Me by Mary Portas is published by Canongate, priced £20. Available now