Marks & Spencer suede skirt is more villain than hero

The saga of the Marks & Spencer suede skirt is one for the “hero products” marketing textbook, and not necessarily in a good way. Is this much-heralded item with a price tag of £199/€279 a glorious turning point for M&S’s underperforming clothing division or the nadir of its try-hard desperation?

Like hemlines from season to season, it could still go in either direction, but if I had to bet, I’d go with “nadir”.

I'll admit I'm biased – in part – against the business merits of Project Suede Skirt because I do not much like the skirt itself. Even on Alexa Chung and Olivia Palermo, the super-thin celebrities snapped wearing the tan mid-length design in advance of its arrival in stores, the item did not, to me, say "stylists' dream".

Instead, it said “are you sure this 1970s fashion revival is a good idea?” followed by “hmm, maybe it would be okay on Alexa in black”.

Then I started to wonder whether Chung and Palermo were the first-choice clothes horses or if there were other, even more bankable, models out there who had decided to pass up the opportunity to help “rescue” M&S’s credentials with the fickle-by-definition fashion press.

One thing that is very clear is that the management of Marks & Spencer is proud of both the “buttery soft” skirt and its accompanying publicity machine.

It first cranked into action at the start of 2015, when the skirt was used to illustrate numerous warnings in the glossies that a 1970s-themed spring-summer would soon be upon us. By April, M&S was on a suede skirt roll. It had created an online waiting list and made sure to tell everybody about it. Then, because it’s not Harvey Nichols, it pumped out a machine-washable, faux- suede version at the more palatable price of £39.50/€59. The plugs kept coming.

The hype, but not the actual sales, coincided with its first quarterly rise in clothing sales in four years. The growth was not much to get the fondue sets and Babycham out for, arriving at 0.7 per cent compared to the same period in 2014. But for a public company, growth is growth. Were a dozen “must-have” headlines about a single skirt really all it would take to engineer a retail recovery?

The next financial update, released last week, effectively said "No, that's as ridiculous as boots in July". M&S clothing sales had gone into reverse again, and at its annual meeting, management were confronted by scathing shareholders. These included Muriel Conway, a retired clothes director for an M&S supplier, who savaged it for perceived vulgarity, erratic sizing and lack of originality and flair.

Conway's turn of phrase – including a pithy "I could weep when I see what's in stores today" – won her so many column inches that M&S style director Belinda Earl felt obliged to lay out a point-by-point rebuttal, during which she made sure to mention the 4,500 suede skirts and the 6,000 "suedette" skirts it had shifted.

But when coupled with chief executive Marc Bolland’s defensive assertion to investors that “the suede skirt has been very successful for us”, this all starts to seem patronising and lame.

And overcooked. In its online product blurb, M&S hilariously regrets to inform customers that “transactions are limited to one skirt in each size” and insists that limited sizes are available, only to then list everything from a six to an 18 as being “in stock”.

Many of the online reviews – which are broadly positive apart from sizing and fit issues – cite the role of the publicity. “With so much of a build-up through the media, I wanted to try this skirt,” wrote one woman, who eventually returned her purchase because she “didn’t feel the wow factor”. Another, who judged it “an uninspired design in a fetching shade of mud”, concluded she had been a “victim of excellent PR”.

Undoubtedly, the PR, if not the actual product, did its job in the short term. The problem for M&S now is that it is counting on this “hero product” to deliver a “halo effect” to its wider clothing sales. Yes, it is holding out for a halo from the hero.

It is not the first and won’t be the last company to do this. But wait a minute . . . Whatever happened to consistency? Even people who adore the suede skirt and deploy phrases like “timeless classic” will agree that one hit item per season does not a coherent fashion brand make – certainly not in the case of a chain with floor space as large and unforgiving as M&S.

Customers are not (total) idiots. We resent having to wade through duds on the rails to get to the good stuff. We don’t want one-offs that will make us look like sheep if we succumb to them, we want quality control: without it, PR tricks will be seen for what they are.