A few weeks ago my friend Ry wandered into a branch of TK Maxx and spotted a rack of women’s dresses from Off-White on offer, all for £100 and less. Days later, fashion journalist Dal Chodha tweeted a photo of a jacket from the same brand hanging on the rails of the discount store’s Hammersmith location.
Bear in mind this is Off-White: the Milanese streetwear-slash-luxury label founded by the guy who now makes menswear for Louis Vuitton. Whose dresses retail for between £300 to £2,500. This stuff hits the sales in Selfridges, Harrods and pretty much every bougie department store in west London, but this was TK Maxx, the spiritual and physical home of pink Himalayan salt, cheap Bluetooth speakers and Le Coq Sportif shoes you’d get the piss ripped out of you for wearing at school.
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Things, evidently, have changed for TK Maxx. The set-up might still be a shit-show – clothes hastily packed onto wonky-wheeled hangers – but there’s good shit in there now. Like, really good shit. Shit that people actually want. So I headed to a couple of London branches to hunt for the kind of designer clothes I can’t afford at RRP.
Enter: the “Gold” section in the Oxford Street TK Maxx.
TK Maxx’s Gold section is a bit like that “luxury mall” at Heathrow, just much less shiny and with fewer elderly millionaires. Among its racks you might stumble across a gloriously tacky Balenciaga handbag, or a second-hand Gucci purse kept inside a glass cabinet. I’ve seen Raf Simons-designed items from his short-lived, if celebrated, ready-to-wear Calvin Klein collections; some were old press samples and dead stock, others were one-offs.
For those who don’t give a shit about how the fashion world operates, an appropriate comparison would be: walking into a satellite town open mic night to find Ariana Grande belting out “One Last Time”. For luxury style neeks, it’s a high street nirvana.
The first thing that caught my eye was a Calvin Klein 205W309NYC piece: a mustard yellow rubber T-shirt with a muslin cloth-like underlay. I squeezed my way into the base layer, which resembled a risqué hospital gown, and yanked the rubber layer over my head.
Turned out it didn’t have a conventional “front” or “back”, so I spent a while spinning it around my neck trying to find a flattering way for it to sit. This proved fruitless. It cost £199, which, fair fucks, sounds expensive – but when you consider it costs over £1,500 on the rack, and that there’s probably not that many of these floating around, it’s surely got some value.
As you can see in the photo above, I also tried on some Versace trousers (£120, RRP more like £600) that were clearly in TK Maxx because nobody had bothered to hem them. But I thought they actually looked alright, just a bit impractical, in that there was absolutely no way I could wear shoes and/or move with them on.
I was still feeling the trousers, so kept them on, but swapped the top for a rather nice Stella McCartney vest (£70 rather than £400 or so). It was cute, but, on this gayboy, looked a bit “homosexual schoolteacher on a gaycation” – so I thought I’d mix it up with the most hettie accessory possible: a £5 Ben Sherman bucket hat.
TK Maxx really is catering to every possible demographic; the “Anyway, here’s Wonderwall” boys looking for shit zip jackets and festival clobber will sleep well tonight!
For the next look I fancied a complete re-up, so paired some painted slim white jeans from Margiela (£80, RRP more like £300) with a blue Versace jacket (£199.99, RRP £485). Once I’d stretched the jeans to shit trying to get them on, I realised I’d forgotten to grab a T-shirt. No matter! This is fashion, darling! Blazers sans shirts are all the rage right now.
I’d exhausted my options, and felt like the girl on the fitting room shift was certain that I’d either collapsed or was doing something pervy. But inspired by the swirling rumours of the strong offerings in the Hammersmith store, I followed the Pet Shop Boys’ advice and headed west.
TK Maxx Hammersmith feels distinctly more like a Peterborough Debenhams than the glossy new TK Maxx in central, and its stock was similarly underwhelming. While there were a few nice items of womenswear, for the most part all I could find were a thousand Armani suit jackets that looked exactly the same and smatterings of Dolce and Gabbana – a brand that, as everybody should know by now, has been cancelled.
That infamous Off-White jacket, the golden snitch of my TK Maxx voyage, was nowhere to be seen.
Unsatisfied with what I’d found, and convinced there was a shining diamond piece in one of the stores I should probably spend the rest of my day ransacking, I headed for the door empty-handed.
And then: there it was, right in front of me. On the rack – a mirage in the Sahara of discount retail. That fucking jacket.
I’d seen it before, in the very tweet that had brought me here: this gigantic, sort-of-unflattering, frosted plastic Off-White raincoat with buttons like gemstones. Here was the opportunity to own a £1,000 jacket for pretty much 90 percent off. A fashion relic for a knockdown price, if you will. So what did I do?
Reader, I bought it.
The woman behind the till told me it was “really unique” as she bagged it up, looked at me like I was a fucking weirdo and sent me out the door. I sort of think I look quite good in this shit I’m not meant to be able to afford. And that’s the point of TK Maxx, isn’t it?
We live in a world that’s choked by the effects of fast fashion, with poorly made clothes disposed of every six months piling up in landfills because trends are so fleeting that we need to free up space for some unnecessary new shit. It’s now common practice for luxury houses to burn unsold stock in order to ensure it doesn’t reach the public at a knock-down price – thus “devaluing” their work. But in a world that’s fucking burning itself, isn’t it better that these clothes find new homes, even if that means they reach their owners through less haughty means? What TK Maxx offers is an alternative: for brands to value the planet over brand image.
TK Maxx’s days of being a goldmine for salt shakers and Jamie Oliver cookbooks are over. It’s a new leaf, an exciting one for people who love fashion but are forced to treat department stores like museums. I never thought I’d say it, but Harrods? You better watch your back, babe. It’s 2019, and everybody’s favourite discount retailer is well and truly coming for your gig.
