All designer gear.” Phil stands right in front of me modelling the suit, running his hands up and down the lapels like some gentleman tailor He even offers his own sales pitch. “Do you know that you can sleep in the back of your car with this quality of suit, wake up, give it a shake and there won’t be a crease in it.” I start to consider whether everyone in the club is working on a commission basis.When Bolt goes off to tour the club, I ask Phil where he thinks Bolt might get the suits from I want to know how hot they really are. Phil has a slightly different understanding of where they might come from. “Working in a place like this, you’re bound to get to know people,” he says “He probably gets them at cost from the factory All I know is that they’re top-notch and they’re cheap. I don’t ask anything else.”It might have been my imagination, but the question seems to have irritated Phil, dressed from head to toe in his top-notch clothes from goodness knows where. He stands incessantly sipping his half of lager, gazing out into the great unknown of the ordinary punter Finally, he turns to me. “Look, if you want to pay full price for your gear, go ahead.
The next thing that you’ll be saying is that you want to queue in the rain to get in here with the rest of the mugs. I’m sure Bolt could arrange that for you, if you ask him.”It is a long night. I eventually start to leave the club at four in the morning, with my new Louis Feraud clutched tightly under my arm It’s wrapped in half a binliner Bolt shakes my hand as I depart. “You’ll look like a proper VIP in that suit,” says Bolt, “even if you do have to sleep in the back of your car tonight.”.
IF YOU have wrinkles, if your thighs are lumpy, your nails are bitten or your legs are hairy, you should be ashamed There is absolutely no excuse for sloppiness. The beauty business is booming – even if you live in Nowheresville, Back-of-Beyond, you are within easy reach of deep-cleansing galvanic facials and nail-sculpting. Clarins alone has 49 flagship salons nationwide that have been designated “gold salons” and turn over around £4m a year between them; its top salon, called Skin Deep, is in a town called Rhuddlan, near Clwyd in north Wales. Proprietress Suzanne Newberry and her staff perform nearly 100 facials a week, at £18.50 a go.
She has “a couple of thousand” clients on her books, and thinks a weekly visit to a salon is “becoming accepted, like a weekly visit to the hairdresser”.
Who are these radiantly smooth-skinned clients who are prepared to invest so much time and money? Ladies who lunch, socialites, Joan Collins or the Princess of Wales? “Oh, no. Ordinary ladies; professionals – all ages, everyone really.”This is a national phenomenon. From smart salons franchised by cosmetics companies to one-person enterprises run from the hairdresser’s back room, beauty therapists everywhere are staging a spirited takeover of the high street. “There’s no question that the industry is growing – in the past five years, the money taken has probably doubled,” says Marion Mathews, editor of Health and Beauty Salon.”Business is absolutely booming,” agrees Sue Harmsworth of Espa, a company with nearly 200 centres nationwide. “What we are doing in spas and salons has reached the high street, and this move has become much more defined over the last two or three years.
People are also moving away from the department stores – because they are fed up with girls doing a hard sell without much technical knowledge – to smaller salons with qualified therapists who get to know their clients.”Call Espa, and wherever you are, it will put you in touch with a local salon or a freelance therapist who will visit your home: the magic beauty number is 01483 454444.Independent salons are also doing very nicely, thank you. “When we started up nine months ago, the bank didn’t want to know I bet they wish they’d backed us now. We’re packed out,” says Kim Fallon, co-director of VIPs of Streetly, a suburb of Birmingham.Driving out through sprawling council estates to Streetly, one passes a cluster of near-derelict shops crouching at the foot of a tower block development The newsagent, butcher, grocer are all boarded up. Virtually the only unit showing signs of life is the one with a huge poster saying: “Health, Beauty and Fitness Salon! Yes! We’re open!”A few miles further on, VIPs is perched above a pharmacy on the busy main shopping street in Streetly. The salon opened nine months ago, and inside, all is spanking new and freshly decorated, in soothing shades of blue and yellow. On the wall in reception, Kim Fallon and her partner, Annalee Leung, have 19 carefully framed certificates, ranging from City and Guilds qualifications to diplomas in the complexities of Nailtiques manicure. “Greensleeves” plays discreetly in the background, and the curtains are elegantly looped up in complicated drapes.”It was so scruffy when we found it – it used to be the old bank,” says Kim, proudly.