The problem with Topshop

There are few things I consider traumatic in my rather uneventful life. One of them is turning up late to something; be it a lunch or a university class. Another is when my phone/internet doesn't work for an unknown reason. And one more is: shopping at Topshop.

I am aware this makes me sound demented. Shopping elsewhere on the high street can be enjoyable and satisfying. But Topshop has in recent years become the noughties' mecca of The Fashionable Girl who wants to look like she has casually thrown on a bang up to the minute outfit that was actually very expensive and meticulously chosen.

Some of the clothes are just intimidating and clearly idiotic to wear should you be a size 10 or over. The dictated 'hot' item for the autumn, apparently, is a pair of sequinned high-waisted knickers. Each section of the display in Manchester's Arndale Topshop was adorned with an pair in the appropriate colour pallette. I assume you are to wear them with tights or bare legs. But I have never seen something so ludicrous projected on to the high street-shopping public. Obviously some idiosyncratic Topshop disciples who blindly prostitute their debit cards for whatever is projected onto them are going to buy them; people who would not buy the same item if it was in H&M and not Topshop.

I am not a fan of the current floral-pattern trend for fear I would look like a wipe-clean tablecloth in a steamy-windowed greasy spoon. Nor am I a sporter of the blazer; I left school four years ago and have had quite enough of them to last a lifetime. I know what suits me, but for some reason nothing that falls into said category is for sale in Topshop. The jeans are 'boyfriend'; the cardigans are cable-knit; the leggings are sequinned and £40; and all of it is poor quality.

But if you don't like florals, blazers, hipsters, or £40 leggings, there isn't much else to choose from. Skirts are bright purple and made of faux ostrich feathers. Tops are elastic bands covered in sequins and impossible to wear if you enjoy the odd red wine or a bag of mini cheddars. All in all, the lifestyle that Topshop exudes is preened, made-up, glamorous. Which is all very well, but there is nothing that you can 'throw on' or wear a couple of days in a row without it being noticeable. The clothes are not easy to accessorise as they are all statement pieces in themselves.

In the end, after an hour of picking up, putting back, dithering and withering looks from my boyfriend, I settled on an evening jacket that will endure the approaching season of friends' 21sts. At £60 I would not have bought it had I not been softening the blow with a giftcard and student discount.

Call me boring, but I am not so deluded to think that everything in Topshop is nice just because it is sold there. Topshop is its own enemy: nothing in the high street rivals it but that means it has to better itself every year, stocking weirder and more bizzare clothing that is automatically the accepted uniform of cool for that season.

Phillip Green's bottomless pockets are thanks to the scores of fanatics who embrace sequinned knickers. But the day I wear my knickers over my clothes will probably coincide with a breach of section 75 of the Mental Health Act.