The more Ab Fab became famous, the more we did

TV star and business guru Mary Portas tells HANNAH STEPHENSON about putting 'Harvey Nicks' on the shopping radar and her different vision for retail

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WHEN Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley descended on Harvey Nichols out of hours to film the first Absolutely Fabulous in the early 90s, Mary Portas, the store’s creative director who had arranged 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.

nine production companies pitching for the rights to a TV adaptation, plus a scriptwriter in place.

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. “It was a magnetic time,” she says, “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'd have said 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.

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.