On a press trip to London with River Island

Whether I wanted to go to London for two days to check out the new summer collection from River Island. Ehm, yes please! Those are of course easy questions. I love River Island, I love London and I traveled with friends Jamie Li of quarter-magazine.com and Lonneke of Style My Day. So it had to go well. We met at Schiphol and after a flight that was over before we even realized it, we arrived in a drizzly London. First stop: the hotel.

It was just two meters away from Oxford Street, so the words shopping and shopping were immediately on everyone's lips. After a quick freshen-up the car was ready to take us to restaurant Kettner’s where we indulged with Emily, Melanie, and Amanda from River Island in carpaccio with truffle mayonnaise, confit de canard, and the best apple pie with cinnamon ice cream ever. In the corner of the place stood a huge Christmas tree (the English can never start their obsession with Christmas too early), next to it a white piano where a man in a suit was playing classics.

After dinner, we go back to the hotel and I am amazed again at the fact that hotel beds are always so unbelievably comfortable. I sleep like a baby and the next morning we go to the River Island headquarters for a tour.

In the enormous building, about 1000 people work and every corner of the building is filled with people, papers, computers, and, of course, clothes. It is truly unbelievable how busy and full everything is; there is certainly no talk of a clean desk policy. Large binders with fabric samples, huge stacks of paper with collection drawings, orders, and all sorts of exciting papers are in abundance on the small desks.

River Island aims to keep everything under one roof, so the entire process from idea to product happens here. The design department creates the design and eventually it goes to the buyers, and the final collection is also photographed in this building for the website and the lookbooks. Even the boards you see in the stores, the advertisements for the magazines, everything comes from here.

After the headquarters, we get back in the car to head back into the city to visit the showroom. Outside it is cold, but inside it is summer because the Spring/Summer collection for 2015 is hanging on the racks. We see spotless white, nautical stripes, lots of bright and cheerful colors, and everything makes us long for warmth and sun.

Personal favorites are the orange shiny dress with print and the black suede skirt with fringes; they can come live in my closet. We indulge in cupcakes and mini-tacos, and then we receive a gift card for River Island, so I don’t need to explain that we head straight to Oxford Street to turn around in the huge store. Richer by a black dress and a big cozy sweater, I walk outside, heading to the last stop: Selfridges. Of course, of course, I fall for a pair of shoes, because I indeed didn’t have enough of those.

Richer by a black dress and a big cozy sweater, I walk outside, heading to the last stop: Selfridges. Of course, of course, I fall for a pair of shoes, because I indeed didn’t have enough of those.

I am writing this in the lobby of our hotel, Jamie and Lonneke have already headed to Heathrow, but I am staying one more night and day. When in London, stay in London. Just saying. And from now on, I will start marking stripes above my bed and counting down until spring so I can bring that entire SS15 collection home. I’m already looking forward to it.