Coming just a day after US consumer confidence was shown to be running at a very high level, it underlined the unique challenges facing the UK economy and the fashion retail sector there.Based on a survey of over 2,000 people in the days before Theresa May’s Brexit proposal was rejected by EU leaders, GfK’s headline index balance dropped by two points to -9 in September compared to August’s already-weak -7.

Confidence has remained subdued since 2016, the year of the Brexit vote, with the reading being zero or less since then. However, it has stayed well above the -39 it reached a decade ago when the world was going through its last big economic crisis. And it remains higher than December 2016’s -16 reading.Looking at the detail of the latest month’s index, confidence in …