A GUARDIAN 'BEST BOOK TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN 2025'

We’re five minutes away from curtains up on the catwalk show that kick-starts London Fashion Week and there’s no sign of Naomi Campbell – the model who’ll make or break this monumental gamble. As has become customary in my career at Harvey Nichols, the dowager department store we’ve taken from fusty to high fashion in five years, I’ve taken a punt on doing something that could be legendary – or a disaster.

It’s the 1990s: Britpop is dominating the charts, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell stare out from the cover of every glossy magazine and British fashion is ripe for reinvention. Leading the charge is a twenty-something Mary Portas who has been brought in to revitalise the department store Harvey Nichols, at the time more likely to be associated with dowagers than daring designers.

With two babies at home, a sceptical, all-male senior management team to impress and the pressure on to bring in new brands and customers, Mary would need to roll up her sleeves like never before to prove she was the woman for the job. By the millennium, the store would be renowned for its outrageous, headline-grabbing, traffic-stopping window displays; patronage by style icon Lady Di and bolly-swigging duo Patsy and Edina of the iconic sitcom Ab Fab – no longer fusty old Harvey Nicols but Harvey Nicks, daaarling! I Shop, Therefore I Am is the story of how she did it.

In this no-holds-barred account, Mary takes us behind the shop window – to the people who kept the show on the road and the early lessons that have shaped her career. Told with her trademark wit, grit and candour, readers will see first-hand how, armed only with the blank canvas of a shop window and her own creativity, Mary created a business empire that has stood the test of time.