Harrods

High-end department stores are devoted to one idea. Their customers must enter a different world: a parallel universe, ten times better than the real one. “Enter a different world” also happened to be the advertising line for Harrods, the Knightsbridge department store, from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Today Harrods is certainly a different world—but one that arouses sharply mixed feelings. Though it still sells itself as quintessentially English, with a lot of PR flim-flam about its Victorian roots and building, and its Establishment-supplier role of “Everything London”, Harrods today belongs to the Middle East. Since 1985, when Mohamed Al Fayed bought the place, there’s been a Middle Eastern sensibility at the helm, with a Middle Eastern market much in mind. This meant that long before Harrods lost its Royal warrants, its traditional, local customers—toffs and Sloanes—started leaving in droves, to be replaced by tourists and new money from Essex and Egypt. And although it’s now two years since Fayed sold up to the Qatari royal family, this target market is, if anything, more entrenched.