What if I dressed up my living room in mops or gunny sacks?
You know that mall which looks like, not an English village, but an Italian one? In a day’s trip, we found some marvellous outlandish sights. Very cool
Iwas getting a ride home with a colleague one evening about a month ago. In the car, on the way out of office, possibly triggered by something on the radio, he asked if I’d been to Outlet Village. Nope, I said. Too far, isn’t it? Yes, but — he spoke of it highly. Said it was cool, just like an English village from the movies. (Tuscan village though, turns out). The website of Meraas (that’s the developer) says, “The Outlet Village’s iconic layout takes inspiration from San Gimignano in Italy. This spectacular Tuscan hilltop town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and famous for its authentic craftsmanship, timeless style and cultured approach”.
Okay, so authentic craftsmanship and timeless style got itself on the itinerary one weekend, Feb 24. My colleague had managed to get me to succumb to FOMO — Fear of Missing Out, in case you too have been chilling under a dune near Jebel Ali.
I decided to recruit two comrades to keep me company in this rustic-looking designer mall. One, whose ‘domain knowledge’ in fabrics and garments and judgement of what’s worth it and what isn’t, I’m constantly in awe of.
Let the record show that later that day, the three of us walked out of the place with a dozen bags, exhausted poster children of vulgar consumerism. That we had a good time isn’t besides the point at all.
Now, this mall, with it’s lovely stone architecture, is flat. You keep walking, no escalators or lower ground floor and upper ground. Just endless on-ground shops, designer outlets, vast stretches of ra-ra retail. Coach, temptingly, was on 40 per cent off. So were a bunch of other places. Somewhere, less tempting, I might have seen feathers on a belt. Other sights stood out. At the coffee shop Affogato Caffe, opposite Galeries Lafayette, there was this deal going on: if your bill was over Dh70 you could win a diamond ring by getting the 4-digit combination of a lock right! Say what? Yea, exactly.
So we had two affogatos, one cappuccino, a brownie and two bottles of water — had to buy that second bottle only to notch the bill up to the Dh70 mark. The waiter, possibly sensing a sucker, smiled at me, and said that now if I wanted to, I could try my luck with the diamond. A sucker leaped up, very gung-ho and tried a couple of times, zero method to the maiden attempt madness or four successive ones. No diamond was won. The second bottle of water was chugged on the cab back to civilisation.
What really struck me as bizarre — and I’m not even getting into the window display at Saccoor Brothers; which was a heap of mud, actual top soil, minimally shall-we-say, landscaped. It just lay there looking topsoily. But anyway, pardon the digression — what struck me as really bizarre were the cushion covers at Tommy Hilfiger. I mean, rustic chic and all is very well, but I was thinking, if I just dressed up my living room in mops or in a gunny sack, which is what I saw was passing off as decor, people who came to my house might pull me aside and offer a loan to tide over the hard times. But I shouldn’t be a snob. I’m all for upcycling — pallets transforming into ladders and what have you. But the icing on the cake was when two weeks down the line, I saw a photograph in the paper of a bunch of kids in Colombia waiting for an Air Force plane to pick up the sacks of cocoa beans and fly them out of the country. It’s a lovely picture. To my eyes though, all that was visible was the chicanery, if that’s the word, the marketing, the journey of a gunny bag to world-class decor. Who says, if you’ve seen one mall you’ve seen them all.