With only a few exceptions, shoppers are giving the cold shoulder to retailers that play on being English. Jaeger is just the latest in a long line to experience this.

Jaeger, Dickens & Jones and Austin Reed are all names associated with a particular kind of Englishness (rather than the hotchpotch notion of Britishness) and all held in high esteem as purveyors of clothing heritage.

The problem is that two out of three ran into a wall (albeit Austin Reed now operates as an online retailer and Dickens & Jones is a House of Fraser brand), and Jaeger has now fallen into administration.

All of them were/are on Regent Street, which has also moved from being home to a raft of predominantly British retailers to an international concern that attracts names such as Tory Burch, Apple and J Crew, as well as home-grown stalwarts such as Hamleys and Liberty.

This is a glamorous thoroughfare that is the go-to destination for many offshore retailers looking to set up in the UK, particularly those from the US.

Being English

The question is – is there still a place for retailers that trade off having a distinctly English world view (or British at a stretch, Brexit notwithstanding), and what does this boil down to?

A look at the Austin Reed store when it was trading on Regent Street revealed that it was very much like any other fairly traditional menswear operator, with a bit of womenswear thrown in for good measure.

This meant attempting to trade on a sense of tradition while emphasising that it was still contemporary and ‘relevant’.

This proved a fine line to tread and ultimately shoppers deemed that it had strayed from the path and it fell away. It also happened to be pretty aspirational, which clearly did not help.

To think Dickens & Jones is to head even further back into the history of retail brands associated with the UK.

The shop on Regent Street closed in the second half of the last decade and there was a deal of lamentation when it disappeared.

It was, however, a bit like Woolies. Those complaining most about its fate were also those least likely to have wandered through its doors.

World view

All of which makes the conclusion, that shoppers have little truck with English heritage, hard to avoid.

Retail in the UK is international in a way that it has never been, and a visit to Regent Street is just the tip of a global iceberg.

The only time ‘British’ works? When it is tongue-in-cheek, in the style of Ted Baker.