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Apr. 6th, 2008 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_elyanYou can blame this one on the toaster.
Walking into Cambridge today, I passed the new-minted jewel in Cambridge’s shopping crown, our enormous branch of John Lewis. As is usual with John Lewis, the window display was a “gifts to make the perfect wedding” sort of thing. One of these was a toaster, which I saw, passed, then felt dragged back to, just to check I wasn’t going blind. A four-slice toaster, quite a substantial one, for £152. I’ll repeat that, in case you didn’t get it – one hundred and fifty-two of your earthling pounds. For a TOASTER.
The world is a very silly place.
Anyway… From looking in John Lewis’ window, I found myself drawn into the brand-new shopping centre which links it to the centre of town – the Grand Arcade. This opened a couple of weeks ago, and has carved a path from John Lewis, through the old branch of Dixon’s, and straight into Cambridge’s dowdy old Lion Yard Shopping Centre, a 1970’s monstrosity which destroyed a knot of streets by the Market Square.
Now the thing about the Grand Arcade, as a cursory look at the website will suggest, is that nowhere in it will you find shops selling things you actually need. Nor, by and large, will you find the usual chain-stores. Nearly every shop in the place sells clothes, and of those shops, nearly all (with the possible exception of Topshop/Topman) sell at the upper end of the market. Everything else is coffee shops, techie gadget shops, and of course John Lewis. In short, the Grand Arcade is that most modern of city-centre conceits, an Aspirational Shopping Centre.
The essence of Aspirational Shopping Centres is to make you feel that, by buying things in them, you are somehow partaking in a lifestyle more rarefied than the everyday. You don’t buy clothes in Aspirational Shopping, you buy Fashion – Next sells clothes, Ted Baker sells Fashion. Everything about the experience is designed to make you feel that, by (literally) buying into it, you are a little bit special – the Kind Of Person Who Shops at the Grand Arcade. The stores that inhabit such places demand the atmosphere, because it makes their customers feel less uptight, and less uptight people can reach their wallets more easily. You wouldn’t catch L K Bennett in the human sausage-machine of the Grafton Centre, any more than you would catch the Grand Arcade allowing Burger King into their array of food providers. The aim is separation through the medium of aspiration.
The most interesting thing about the Grand Arcade, from the point of view of the Aspirational Shopping Experience, is its architecture. The architecture of shopping centres has gone through several phases since the 1960’s, of which the most recent is the re-admittance of natural light (if you don’t believe what a change this makes, have a look at the Queensgate Centre in Peterborough, which is a classic of the enclosed 1970’s style, and compare it with any modern centre).
The Grand Arcade continues this trend by borrowing its architectural style wholesale from Sir Norman Foster’s Great Court at the British Museum. This is a trend which started in earnest at Bluewater, with its uneasy mix of shopping centre vernacular and Roman-themed statuary and friezes.
Again, the aim is to make the experience something more than mere “shopping” – to give it, for want of a more precise term, a Touch of Class. The problem is that the British Museum is a treasure-house of world culture and knowledge – the Grand Arcade is, at the end of the day, a bazaar with ideas above its station, a clarty outpost of the rag trade. For one to ride on the coat-tails of the other is somehow just a little bit obscene.
As may have started to become clear, I find the whole concept of Aspirational Shopping (or whatever you choose to coin it) to be bollocks. This is not because I find the concepts themselves to be useless. I am in favour of aspiration – the desire to do better than we did before, by whatever measure matters to us, is a central part of the human experience. And, less laudably, I am also in favour of shopping – I am enough of a good little consumer on the hamster-wheel of modern life to appreciate the pleasures of shopping for what you desire (or, as Bill Bailey beautifully put it, perusing the Laminated Book of Dreams), including (if that’s your thing) clothes. What I take issue with is the yoking of the two things together – the idea that you can aspire to fulfil or better yourself through the effluxion of cash in the right places, that with the purchase of the suit comes the purchase of the lifestyle that is supposed to shimmer around it. Filthy lucre plays a large part, obviously – aspirational shopping, like aspirational travel, doesn’t work unless by showing you can afford the product, you also show you are above the common herd who can’t. Unfortunately, the exchange rate between money and talent, intelligence or any other worthwhile personal trait is so hopelessly unreliable that no-one but a fool or a marketing executive would believe in it.
There is every possibility that I don’t “get” aspirational shopping because I don’t buy the right kind of things. I buy clothes for practicality (and, if some of my shirts are to be believed, shock value), I don’t wear a watch or drive a car, and my flat is innocent of beautiful furnishings, because they would take up space I need for bookcases. The things I am interested in shopping for – books, CD’s, DVD’s – do not have any particular quality imparted by the price you pay for them – a copy of Harry Potter and the Unending Cash-In bought from Tesco’s will have the same words in the same order as one bought from Foyle’s. Grading them according to the place bought or the price paid is as foolish as the notion that the mains electricity from the socket has a different value depending on which supplier you buy it from. That latter, of course, applies in real life, but then I have already said that the world is a very silly place.
If you wanted to sink even lower, you could say I don’t understand aspirational shopping because I’m a man. This comes from the school of cliché which tells us that men don’t understand clothes, and women don’t understand cars – men go to the garage to aspire to a lifestyle, and women go to a place like the Grand Arcade. This argument is clearly specious as hell among the people I know, though it may have more credence among some of the people I’ve worked with. In fact, I am the sort of person the Grand Arcade is supposed to appeal to – a Young Professional, who should be aspiring to have his clothes just that little more exquisitely tailored than the run of the mill. In fact, the idea fills me with icy dread.
In the final analysis, the Aspirational Shopping idea plays on the same hopes and fears as advertising and marketing – the fear that we are not keeping up with some imagined standard expected of us, and the hope than we can bridge the gap by spending money, rather than actually doing anything useful. It doesn’t work for anyone with more than a shred of self-knowledge (and a self to know), but there’s plenty of money to be made in the meantime, perpetuating the myth. It is, after all, what you earn it for. Isn’t it?
PS – the following is nothing to do with the foregoing, but I couldn’t leave it out once I spotted it. Part of the Grand Arcade is the new Cambridge Central Library, which is allegedly opening this autumn (eight months behind schedule). The advertising puff for this new wonder states that:
“Soon you will be able to select from the very best books from the past, the present, and the future”.
From the future, eh? Evidently the boffins at Sidgwick Avenue have been keeping something very special up their sleeves…
It’s comin’ home, it’s comin’ home, it’s comin’ – the TARDIS is comin’ home…
Walking into Cambridge today, I passed the new-minted jewel in Cambridge’s shopping crown, our enormous branch of John Lewis. As is usual with John Lewis, the window display was a “gifts to make the perfect wedding” sort of thing. One of these was a toaster, which I saw, passed, then felt dragged back to, just to check I wasn’t going blind. A four-slice toaster, quite a substantial one, for £152. I’ll repeat that, in case you didn’t get it – one hundred and fifty-two of your earthling pounds. For a TOASTER.
The world is a very silly place.
Anyway… From looking in John Lewis’ window, I found myself drawn into the brand-new shopping centre which links it to the centre of town – the Grand Arcade. This opened a couple of weeks ago, and has carved a path from John Lewis, through the old branch of Dixon’s, and straight into Cambridge’s dowdy old Lion Yard Shopping Centre, a 1970’s monstrosity which destroyed a knot of streets by the Market Square.
Now the thing about the Grand Arcade, as a cursory look at the website will suggest, is that nowhere in it will you find shops selling things you actually need. Nor, by and large, will you find the usual chain-stores. Nearly every shop in the place sells clothes, and of those shops, nearly all (with the possible exception of Topshop/Topman) sell at the upper end of the market. Everything else is coffee shops, techie gadget shops, and of course John Lewis. In short, the Grand Arcade is that most modern of city-centre conceits, an Aspirational Shopping Centre.
The essence of Aspirational Shopping Centres is to make you feel that, by buying things in them, you are somehow partaking in a lifestyle more rarefied than the everyday. You don’t buy clothes in Aspirational Shopping, you buy Fashion – Next sells clothes, Ted Baker sells Fashion. Everything about the experience is designed to make you feel that, by (literally) buying into it, you are a little bit special – the Kind Of Person Who Shops at the Grand Arcade. The stores that inhabit such places demand the atmosphere, because it makes their customers feel less uptight, and less uptight people can reach their wallets more easily. You wouldn’t catch L K Bennett in the human sausage-machine of the Grafton Centre, any more than you would catch the Grand Arcade allowing Burger King into their array of food providers. The aim is separation through the medium of aspiration.
The most interesting thing about the Grand Arcade, from the point of view of the Aspirational Shopping Experience, is its architecture. The architecture of shopping centres has gone through several phases since the 1960’s, of which the most recent is the re-admittance of natural light (if you don’t believe what a change this makes, have a look at the Queensgate Centre in Peterborough, which is a classic of the enclosed 1970’s style, and compare it with any modern centre).
The Grand Arcade continues this trend by borrowing its architectural style wholesale from Sir Norman Foster’s Great Court at the British Museum. This is a trend which started in earnest at Bluewater, with its uneasy mix of shopping centre vernacular and Roman-themed statuary and friezes.
Again, the aim is to make the experience something more than mere “shopping” – to give it, for want of a more precise term, a Touch of Class. The problem is that the British Museum is a treasure-house of world culture and knowledge – the Grand Arcade is, at the end of the day, a bazaar with ideas above its station, a clarty outpost of the rag trade. For one to ride on the coat-tails of the other is somehow just a little bit obscene.
As may have started to become clear, I find the whole concept of Aspirational Shopping (or whatever you choose to coin it) to be bollocks. This is not because I find the concepts themselves to be useless. I am in favour of aspiration – the desire to do better than we did before, by whatever measure matters to us, is a central part of the human experience. And, less laudably, I am also in favour of shopping – I am enough of a good little consumer on the hamster-wheel of modern life to appreciate the pleasures of shopping for what you desire (or, as Bill Bailey beautifully put it, perusing the Laminated Book of Dreams), including (if that’s your thing) clothes. What I take issue with is the yoking of the two things together – the idea that you can aspire to fulfil or better yourself through the effluxion of cash in the right places, that with the purchase of the suit comes the purchase of the lifestyle that is supposed to shimmer around it. Filthy lucre plays a large part, obviously – aspirational shopping, like aspirational travel, doesn’t work unless by showing you can afford the product, you also show you are above the common herd who can’t. Unfortunately, the exchange rate between money and talent, intelligence or any other worthwhile personal trait is so hopelessly unreliable that no-one but a fool or a marketing executive would believe in it.
There is every possibility that I don’t “get” aspirational shopping because I don’t buy the right kind of things. I buy clothes for practicality (and, if some of my shirts are to be believed, shock value), I don’t wear a watch or drive a car, and my flat is innocent of beautiful furnishings, because they would take up space I need for bookcases. The things I am interested in shopping for – books, CD’s, DVD’s – do not have any particular quality imparted by the price you pay for them – a copy of Harry Potter and the Unending Cash-In bought from Tesco’s will have the same words in the same order as one bought from Foyle’s. Grading them according to the place bought or the price paid is as foolish as the notion that the mains electricity from the socket has a different value depending on which supplier you buy it from. That latter, of course, applies in real life, but then I have already said that the world is a very silly place.
If you wanted to sink even lower, you could say I don’t understand aspirational shopping because I’m a man. This comes from the school of cliché which tells us that men don’t understand clothes, and women don’t understand cars – men go to the garage to aspire to a lifestyle, and women go to a place like the Grand Arcade. This argument is clearly specious as hell among the people I know, though it may have more credence among some of the people I’ve worked with. In fact, I am the sort of person the Grand Arcade is supposed to appeal to – a Young Professional, who should be aspiring to have his clothes just that little more exquisitely tailored than the run of the mill. In fact, the idea fills me with icy dread.
In the final analysis, the Aspirational Shopping idea plays on the same hopes and fears as advertising and marketing – the fear that we are not keeping up with some imagined standard expected of us, and the hope than we can bridge the gap by spending money, rather than actually doing anything useful. It doesn’t work for anyone with more than a shred of self-knowledge (and a self to know), but there’s plenty of money to be made in the meantime, perpetuating the myth. It is, after all, what you earn it for. Isn’t it?
PS – the following is nothing to do with the foregoing, but I couldn’t leave it out once I spotted it. Part of the Grand Arcade is the new Cambridge Central Library, which is allegedly opening this autumn (eight months behind schedule). The advertising puff for this new wonder states that:
“Soon you will be able to select from the very best books from the past, the present, and the future”.
From the future, eh? Evidently the boffins at Sidgwick Avenue have been keeping something very special up their sleeves…
It’s comin’ home, it’s comin’ home, it’s comin’ – the TARDIS is comin’ home…
