top of the pops; Fashion speed freaks raid Britain's Topshop for thrifty-chic threads.

Byline: Sarah Mower

In their heads, they're just a bunch of tomboys whose idea of a commercial summit is to slouch into work, check one another out, put their feet on the table, and ask, "Well, what do we feel like wearing today, then?" On the other hand, Jane Shepherdson and her team of buyers and designers are also the most exalted fashion executives in Britain. These are the women of Topshop, the fast-fashion, low-cost chain (there are 298 stores in the UK and more on the way), who in their loose-limbed, noncorporate way generate multimillion-pound sales on the strength of, say, their violent collective aversion to gypsy skirts and a simultaneously insatiable craving for skinny jeans.

Which is exactly the feeling that has raged through their ramshackle, clothes-crammed prairie of an Oxford Circus buying floor since early summer. As far back as May, Shepherdson had faith that anything skinny-legged was about to explode. "Everyone was wearing footless tights with dresses and short denim skirts," she says. By "everyone" she means girls on the street and in the office, who had taken to them as a revolt, she reckons, against the "momsy" gypsy skirt, which, all last summer, she was loath to have darken Topshop's door. Then, trials of their gray Baxter skinny jean began selling out in escalating quantities-but only after the girls in the office had themselves bought them and discovered the waistband gaped.

After that, it was a race to design and source everything that works with a skinny leg. Long T-shirts, cropped jackets, and bolero knits started flying out. Supplies of a chunky electric-blue mohair sweater evaporated in a week of 85-degree heat. By then, the hordes of fashion speed freaks who raid Topshop up and down Britain were slaloming off in a punkish/rockabilly/eighties direction. Cinch belts were disappearing in vast volumes; pointy shoes accelerated to overtake round toes. Nick Passmore, head of design, says she clocked what was up when she saw what girls were doing with their hair. "You were starting to see all this backcombing going on." And it's true: Just outside Topshop's behemoth of a flagship store at Oxford Circus, which 180,000 shoppers trawl each week, stands a teenage newspaper seller, her hair gloriously bouffed and ratted, eyeliner finished in an exact uptick, handing out the Evening Standard. In a season when fashion magazines were predicting a return to the soignee, Brit girls have got a look together for themselves.

The Topshop team's fearless instinct for sifting looks into exciting but wearable components has landed it in a unique position at home-and, increasingly, with canny American travelers. On paper, the chain is meant to target an early-20s customer on a budget, but those have visibly become empty words in these ageless, classless, hi-lo, international-fashion times. The snaking queues at the Oxford Circus checkouts (as long as immigration lines at JFK, at peak times) are made up of fashion fiends aged ten to 45, as well as-whatever you do, act cool and don't look-the likes of Kate Moss, Gwyneth Paltrow, Scarlett Johansson, and Maria Sharapova. "I love the fact that people say, 'Where did you get that?' and I've spent thirteen quid on it," Paltrow once remarked. "I get such a lot of stuff from Topshop. I love it." Sharapova called it "one of the most exciting shopping experiences ever." And Moss, who swooped up multicolored armfuls of "lady pants" and a pair of metallic ...