The Body Shop, the skincare and cosmetics retailer founded by the campaigner Anita Roddick in the 1970s, is set to appoint administrators in a move likely to result in lost jobs and shop closures.

The pan-European private equity investor Aurelius bought the company six weeks before Christmas but said trading over the festive period and early January had been weak.

The retail chain, which has more than 200 shops, also did not have enough working capital to continue trading in its current form.

Administrators at FRP Advisory are likely to be appointed as soon as this week to handle an insolvency process, Sky News reported, citing sources who said they expected the closure of a significant number of the stores. The Body Shop’s international businesses have already been sold to an unknown family office, according to Retail Week.

Roddick, an environmental campaigner, activist and entrepreneur, founded the Body Shop in Brighton in 1976. The company remained under her ownership for three decades, until she sold it in 2006. Roddick died the following year.

By then, The Body Shop had become synonymous with its ethical positions, including a refusal to stock products tested on animals and a sourcing of ingredients from natural products that are traded ethically.

Roddick’s decision to sell the business to the French corporation L’Oréal for £652m attracted criticism from those who saw it as a departure from the company’s values.

The Body Shop has changed hands twice since then, ending up in the ownership of Aurelius in November.

By Rob Davies

Learn more:

Brazil’s Natura Sells The Body Shop to Aurelius in $254 Million Deal

The Brazilian cosmetics maker said the agreement includes a potential earn-out of £90 million, adding that both the sale price and the earn-out would be paid within five years of the transaction closing.

For the debut of her latest collection Sunday night, Elena Velez promised something unusual: a salon dedicated to a nuanced discussion of Margaret Mitchell’s novel “Gone With the Wind,” where fashion critics would join writers and pundits in exploring the complexities of art and censorship.

“What I really want to do is build a community of people who are pushing the discourse forward in different interesting ways,” Velez told BoF the day before, “and who aren’t necessarily the first people that you would think of when you consider the fashion week attendance but who are equally as passionate about aesthetics and culture in a new way.”

The salon attempted to grapple with the controversial novel, which is one of the most popular works of fiction ever published, as is its complex heroine Scarlett O’Hara. But Mitchell’s book, and the movie based on it, also glorifies the Confederacy, and has fallen out of favour with many readers in recent decades. Topics on Sunday ranged from why Mitchell’s book is considered pulp, rather than a great American epic, to which fragrance Scarlett O’Hara might wear (the consensus landed on Thierry Mugler’s Angel).

But it quickly became clear why there was a strict “no phones allowed” policy at the door.

The evening took turns into the far reaches of both ends of the political spectrum of the sort rarely seen at fashion week, where brands typically opt for spectacle designed to go down easy on Instagram.

Along with familiar front row mainstays, including fashion critics and Julia Fox, guests were drawn from Dimes Square, a neighbourhood nestled near Manhattan’s Chinatown, initially known as a nexus for downtown New York culture-makers, and now as a hotbed for a sort of meme-driven, anti-woke political discourse. Among the featured attendees were Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, whose “Red Scare” podcast Elena Velez has guested on (the show has its roots in the far left, but isn’t so easily categorised; Infowars founder Alex Jones has also been featured.) Velez’s sponsors included the Common Sense Society, Encounter Books and Passages Publishing, which are mainly associated with right-wing speakers and authors.

Sitting in her own Elena Velez corset, Khachiyan said “I can’t breathe,” to which an audience member shouted in: “Say her name.” (Both phrases are associated with the Black Lives Matter movement). She described herself, sarcastically, as a “libtard.”

Asked about the juxtaposition of controversial opinion and ready-to-wear, a spokesperson passed along a response from Velez: “I’d challenge the audience to consider multiple truths.”

The day before the salon, Velez said that this alternative format and the dialogue was not meant to be provocative for its own sake.

“I take umbrage with the word provocative, honestly, because I think that it infers and it implies a sense of irony and carelessness that I just don’t relate to or identify with,” she said. “I care very, very much, and I want truly, so badly to be understood.”

Velez’s talent is recognised by the fashion industry – she’s won many prestigious awards including the CFDA prize for emerging designer of the year in 2022. Last week, she was named a semifinalist for the LVMH Prize. Even so, her relationship to the fashion world is uneasy.

She’s been forthright about how acclaim hasn’t resulted in financial security, and has used her growing visibility to poke back at the fashion system. Last season she sent models stomping through a makeshift mud pit in an old Bushwick factory. In the middle of the finale, the models broke rank — fighting and flailing and dragging each other through the mud.

On Sunday, guests could view models in Velez’s signature corsets leaning over a spread of food, then mixed in with with the crowd during the discussion. The 10 looks included layered gowns that mixed high-end silks with humble acetate, drawing inspiration from Gone With the Wind’s O’Hara, who facing dwindling resources after the Civil War, tears off curtains to fashion a new ball gown.

The clothes, said Velez, were meant to paint a portrait of various psychological states — and American women in the face of apocalypse and collapse. Velez says the book “Sexual Personae” written by academic and cultural critic Camille Paglia has been formative to her conception of her brand. It’s Paglia’s riffs on O’Hara – insecure yet intelligent, petty but also courageous, and straining against patriarchal structures of the era – that Velez found “titillating.”

“I’m the daughter of a single mother who’s a ship captain on the Great Lakes,” Velez told BoF. “I come from Wisconsin. I’m [of] a lower socioeconomic class. I really identify with this feeling of the shrewd and wily woman who’s trying to transcend circumstance and really make something of herself in America, you know?”

As the discussion wound down, Khachiyan and co-host Jack Mason, a writer and podcaster, asked the crowd if they had any questions.

“This is a fashion crowd, they don’t like asking questions,” an audience member said.

The crowd emptied out of the mansion and headed to Sovereign House, an underground discussion and performance space in downtown Manhattan.

“Can you imagine if every fashion show had one of these talks?” asked Khachiyan.

Since its inception, television has been a sort of in-house, always-on, pro bono stylist, shaping how much of America dresses and beckoning us to get out and shop.

In 1953, Lucille Ball launched the $18 billion maternity wear industry when she refused to conceal her pregnancy on “I Love Lucy.” When disco dominated the 70s, we’d go dancing five nights a week, taking our sartorial cues from “Soul Train.” In the 80s, women found assurance that more is more in the television series “Dynasty,” while male lawyers yearned to cast off their pinstripes for the sherbet-coloured linen jackets Don Johnson wore on “Miami Vice.”

And has there ever been anyone whose passion for shopping triggered more cravings than Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw character on Sex and the City?

If television has historically held a monopoly on style guidance, there’s no doubt that in recent years platforms like Instagram have become hugely influential with shoppers. But in the age of social media, TV’s power over how we regard fashion, beauty and style remains potent. It’s why Tory Burch kept selling out of Kerry Washington’s white, double-breasted trench coat during seven seasons of Scandal, and how the voluminous pink tulle Molly Goddard gown that Jodie Comer wore on Killing Eve became the chicest Halloween costume of 2018.

As I outline in my recent book, “Dressing the Part: Television’s Most Stylish Shows,” the key to television’s power is the difference between fashion and costume design. The predominantly young, tech-savvy influencers on social media are eager to give advice and adept at selling stuff. And usually, the stuff looks great on them — as their incessant selfies attest — but what do you know about these influencers besides their surface adorability?

Even when costume design requires the intense wizardry of couture, its inspiration is always rooted in defining character. We don’t see Burch’s white trench belted round an opaque mannequin or some selfie snapper. That trench tops the uniform of one fierce, wickedly smart, take-no-prisoners, get-off-my-runway, lawyer who now “fixes” other people’s carelessness. And when Kerry Washington, the rest of the cast and costume designer Lyn Paolo live tweeted about Olivia Pope’s on-screen outfits, it broke the internet, not just because women wanted a knockout trench, but because they hoped some of the fierce confidence of that “fixer” might still be clinging to the fabric.

Smart costumes give us a clue as to who the wearer is even before we hear one word and are usually worn in a relatable semblance of reality. Consequently, when viewers grow to admire — even love — a character, they start to repeat their idol’s catchphrases, adopt their body language, and set off in pursuit of clothes that help them to dress the part.

“Identification + style = transference.” It’s why “Bridgerton,” Shonda Rhimes’ smashing series about love among the aristocracy in the early 19th century, with its deliberately modern take on period dressing, punchy musical soundtrack and colour-blind casting, hair and make-up, generated double and triple digit increases in online searches for corset dresses, velvet and Empire gowns, cropped men’s blazers, opera length gloves and military jackets, all of which are showing up on red carpets this season.

And who couldn’t see a through line from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” to Timothée Chalamet in a red, sequinned backless jumpsuit at the Venice Film Festival; Dwayne Johnson in a pink satin tuxedo at the Oscars; and Justin Timberlake in a large pearl necklace on Saturday Night Live.

It’s been 20 years since “Friends” shut down production, yet millions of women still have their hair cut in a “Rachel,” not necessarily to look more like Jennifer Aniston, but so that maybe, hopefully, wouldn’t it be lovely if one could attract besties as nice as hers? Instagram offers you followers. Facebook pretends you have friends. The narrative power of television seduces you into believing it’s possible. And that’s worth getting dressed up for.

Hal Rubenstein is the author of Dressing the Part: America’s Most Stylish Shows.

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