High Street Shenanigans

When to avoid crowd on oxford street? I thought 1 pm on Wednesday afternoon might be a good hit. Weekday. Midday. Doesn’t work – I presume Oxford Street is crammed at 4.30 in the morning when everything is closed as well. However having done last few essential clothes/shoes/books purchases onlinie, I decided to descend into real world and remind myself that i live in the shopping capital of Europe. I also embarked on a research into fashion, culture, brands, fabrics etc, since that seems to be where life is pushing me recently (art shows in cloths shops, tshirt printing, cloths sewing, freelance researches for brands and all that jazz) I generally like to know what I’m getting myself into.

Inspired by Stephen Fry’s early twitter (yes, I am on twitter as of today and I’m very ashamed of it) I jumped on the Jubilee line and headed west to Bond Street where, as usually, I got lost and went the wrong direction. I also made the huge mistake of going into Selfridges, having been lured in by the Alexander McQeen exposition in the shop window (I’m a compete sucker for McQueen’s designs, i tend to perv over them on google image search). What a hell on earth it is, I swear I’m never stepping into the place again. Tones of grannies with too much make up (yeah, turns out people over do above the age of 65 too), expertly middle class tourists buying tones and tones of chocolate santa clauses and an army of uniform sales assistants staring judgmentally at my reebok footwear (somewhat the introduction of the requirement to dress up to go shopping escaped me, but then again a lot of things do). Eventually I made it back to the mother of all retail, Oxford Street and proceeded to visit: Zara x3 (chasing size 4 of gorgeous red hills), River Island x3 (chasing black hills i saw in some magazine but now i feel like i made them up), H&M x1, Mango x1, Urban outfitters x1 (chasing earrings i saw online and did indeed bought), Muji x1 (Christmas gifts) and HMV x1 (chasing Amy). Oh, and unfortunately Top bloody Shop times 1 as well.

I don’t like Top Shop. I never did. Especially the one on Oxford Street; 3 or 4 massive floors worth of stuff, which is way too overwhelming and more often than not way too expensive for what it is. I have no clue why this is often referred to as the ‘affordable’ high street super fashion. And today they definitely burned bridges between us, to be precise I was told off for photographing labels on the clothes (this is part of my fabric research i photograph the bit on the label which describes the fabric). ‘You can’t photograph the gourmets, that’s the rules’, me: ‘but erm, it’s only the label. you can’ really see the thing’, ‘no, it’s the rules’. One of these situations out of Little Britain joke ‘computer says no‘. ‘Sorry’, I said innocently, ‘it was just for the research for my column’. Now, I don’t tend to say that often. Unless I really need to pursue something i tend to avoid the i’m a journalist bit, because there is no need to cause PR/Sales people unnecessary stress. This time it was a whole different issue though. Inspired by quite the impressive way Urban Outfitters conduct themselves online I decided to write a piece on how fashion shops operate as cultural institutions via new media. Well, Top Shop doesn’t. I made my exit media-prima ballerina style, feeling slightly guilty (but only slightly)

Mango, however, is a whole different story. Back in Warsaw I once wrote about their fashion show, when they were opening their first shop and it’s been in truly admiring tone for the simple reason that I adore Mango clothes. I also love the fact that they have an outlet shop online (Zara, for example, doesn’t have an online store at all), which i periodically dig for treasures. Since then I’ve been friendly with Mango in Poland. Being the microblogging addict that I am i sat upstairs in the Oxford Street shop, drank some orange juice checked jaiku, twitter and made some notes in the iPod wordpress app. And got chatted up by one of the managers sitting at the table next to mine. As a result I’m on the Mango events invitations list. And I love them even more.

I have one fundamental problem with shops. Their through and through commercial nature. I am one of this people who consistently plan a world revolution and this is usually to abolish capitalism. And even if the above statement is a joke I do tend to have problem with the intrinsic nature of consumerism in our culture. I am also of the opinion that we will all have to cut back on acquiring things very soon. And I start to think that clothes shops are just the institutions to engage in this. Their interests will always be completely opposite to mine (engaging people with culture and arts by organizing free events, rise awareness about the real costs of our consumption etc etc) they will have to drastically reorganize fundamentals of their functioning if our consumption patters will indeed start to change. There is more reasons to try and limit amount of new clothes you buy than saving money (environment, exploitation of underpaid labourers etc etc).

to be continued.

Subscribe to comments Comment | Trackback |