Little M&S powerful

Two years ago, Yasmin Yusuf became an overnight celebrity. The press were on her doorstep, the fashion world was ringing the phone off the hook. And the reason?

Yusuf had been appointed creative director of Marks & Spencer, by implication the individual on whom the failing high-street institution was pinning all its hopes.

The ensuing hysteria was partly due to the place M&S occupies in the hearts of the British public, but a lot more to do with Yusuf's reputation as the woman who knows exactly how our high street ticks.

During the preceding five years as managing director of Warehouse, she had turned the chain into the most fashionforward of the competition, before Topshop stole that mantle. Reports vary as to how much she was worth to Marks & Spencer (£400,000 is the figure usually quoted), but there's no doubt that, in picking her, they were getting the girl with the turnaround formula.

At the end of last year the company announced a rise in annual profits of 30 per cent, at about the same time as rumours started flying that Yusuf was being courted by the king of the high street, Philip Green, owner of Arcadia and Bhs. Nothing came of it. Yusuf is still safe in her office at M&S headquarters in Baker Street. But she is now indisputably the hottest property on the British high street.

Needless to say, job offers are not up for discussion, nor is Yusuf comfortable with the idea of being held up as the person solely responsible for this bright new dawn at M&S, admitting that she had to do some fast learning when she took the job.

"For me there had to be a mind-set change because I was coming from the younger and more fashion-forward end of the marketplace. The average Marks & Spencer customer is mid-thirties to forties and the traditional customer is 50-plus. But, at the end of the day, it's still about women and how they dress, what they need."

Yusuf, 43, is striking and fasttalking (speed and clarity are obviously a virtue when you're rebranding a multimillion-pound business) and she looks confident and relaxed in her Marks & Spencer black silk cargo pants and long-sleeved top, quite an endorsement, given that this is a woman with a sharp-end fashion pedigree.

Brought up in London, she studied at Middlesex Poly and went on to do an MA in fashion textile design at the Royal College of Art. Her first job was as a sales assistant at Jones, then she soon rose through the ranks to become a buyer for Harvey Nichols.

Back in her Warehouse days catering to the customers' needs involved sending trend scouts to the beaches of Ibiza and the clubs of Sydney searching for those allimportant new styling details.

Now she takes her research from railway stations, theatre foyers, restaurants. "I am talking to people all the time. It's much easier as a woman to say, 'Ooh, where did you get those trousers?'"

Yusuf's challenge was to identify the M&S customer and to clarify how to divide them up. "It's about pinpointing particular customers. Even in swimwear the collections are now arranged so that the traditional customer won't have to wade through the tiny bikinis." She has, at long last, reorganised the stores.

"Before, it was a bit, 'Urgh. I'm lost in a sea of black trousers.'" But the priority, of course, has been the cut, styling and quality of the clothes themselves.

Did she have any specific stipulations? "Well, that a jacket should have some shape to it, preferably!" she says, laughing. "I can't do the must-have piece of the season the way I used to, but it's just a different approach. You look at trends broadly, at colours and principles. We don't really talk about fashion here, we talk about style, because all women reach a point when they are buying into their own style; we have our own handwriting and we develop our own look.

"We'll do a low-waist trouser but it's not so low that you have to have a Brazilian bikini wax, so it's right for our customer. We're not going to become more fashionable. I personally think we're at a point where we're quite comfortable."

The Marks & Spencer customer (as opposed to the trend-hungry high-street one) wants what Yusuf calls "newness" but not shock of the new. "One of the criticisms was that we didn't change our stock often enough. Before, you'd have two collections a year, and there are now six, and different stories within each."

Filtering the right kind of new from the inappropriate, and timing, is what it's all about. "I've had to learn a different pace," says Yasmin. "The shearling coat that sold so well this winter, I wanted that in store the year before. But this was the year that it really took off. This was when it was right for us."

Hanging on a rail is a stonewashed denim jacket for summer, the exact replica of the Marc Jacobs number that's been duplicated up and down the high street for a year. The difference is it looks more expensive and will be a more generous fit than the equivalent you found last autumn in Topshop.

Where Marks & Spencer can't compete in terms of instant trends, it's ahead in other areas. "Choice is our thing," says Yusuf. "For summer, we've got a full-blown T-shirt shop like you wouldn't believe. And we've divided that up by shape. Trinny and Susannah may have taken that philosophy nationwide, but in fairness to us, that's what we're doing all the time."

Besides every shape under the sun, they offer choice in terms of price range (three distinct levels have been introduced under Yusuf's direction), and then there's the old advantage of M&S sizing. "We're constantly working on fit - we offer size 8 to 22 in most styles, as well as 20 to 28 in a plus size range that's designed on a different block for the fuller figure."

The technology department - unique among high-street retailers - is also busy working on innovations like machinewashable cashmere. "We do a £50 machine-washable suit. If someone is on a budget, she doesn't want to send it to the dry cleaner's."

Unlike some high-street outlets which churn out super-cheap clothes built to last six months, the Marks philosophy is that if it really works, do it well.

"The little bias-cut dress, the pashmina, the flip-flops and the embroidered bag - I don't think that look has ever gone away, because it suits lots of women of different sizes and different ages," says Yusuf, sweeping her hand over a pretty, pink, summer slip dress.

Yusuf has a 13-year-old son, Louis, by her ex-partner, Peter Sidell, who worked alongside her at Jones and now runs a menswear store, The Library, in Brompton Cross. Otherwise her private life remains strictly under wraps - what there is of it, now that she's overseeing the resurrection of a national treasure.

"I had no idea how much work it would be," she says, fingering a white suit from the new linen collection that could almost have been designed by Stella McCartney. "Isn't this great," she says, with just a hint of pride, "and it's £110. That's something."