After a lifetime in retail, the queen of shops has had a ‘proper epiphany’. She talks about her dislike of the fashion world, her painful childhood and the need for kindness
Mary Portas hates to use the word “transformation” with clients: she doesn’t want to spook them. “They get scared. They’d be like: ‘Oh dear God, let me lie down.’” But transformation is Portas’s signature move – whether she is overhauling a charity shop or a pair of knickers or the British high street. Over the past few years, Portas, 63, has turned her magic on herself and undergone her own metamorphosis. It’s not so much a makeover as “a proper epiphany, an awakening”, she says, pointing to the ceiling of the office where we meet – by which she means to invoke not so much God or religion but “the greater energy and force” that has carried her here.
There are several visual cues to the new Mary. There is the hair, of course. The flame-coloured bob has long gone, scuppered by lockdown. In its place is a honeyed style, whose floppy top Portas lifts to show me the natural colour beneath: salt and pepper, but easy on the salt. Her brother, Lawrence, cuts it. And she is wearing beige, of all things. “This is me now. This is me,” she says. She has a habit of saying things twice, but is quieter than her television persona. “And, actually, this feels Mary.” One thing that hasn’t changed is that she is very much on first name terms with herself. She is sort of self-curious.
