Even for a style addict, this new joyless shopping won’t tempt me
Yesterday, Britain’s high street emerged from its three-month suspended animation. Fashion addict that I am, I had been commissioned to report on the post-pandemic shopping scene. But then a call came just after 8am: “Forget it. We all know it’s going to be dire.” I rolled over and went back to sleep.
When even an inveterate pounder of pavements such as myself can’t be tempted then, whatever the queues yesterday might imply, Great British retail is officially shafted.
Britain is, still, a nation of shopkeepers, making it no less a nation of frenetic buyers. Shopping is our foremost leisure activity, the one sport at which we excel, a quotidian drama in which we all play a part. From medieval Cambridge’s Stourbridge Fair (inspiration for Bunyan’s – thus Thackeray’s – Vanity Fair), via London’s New Exchange of 1609, to Harry Selfridge entertaining his customer audiences, our retail arenas have been sites of spectacle and pure socioeconomic theatre.
If all shopping is theatre, then how much more so clothes shopping, in which we actors get to rig ourselves out? I love the amateur dramatics of the rag trade, have lived for it during dark periods: the opportunity to act, to perform, to transform myself into some brighter, lighter, altogether better being. Oh, the pure sensuousness (in the Miltonic, non-sexual sense): the touch, the feel, the scent and sound of the thing! Oh, the pure sensualness (in the non-miltonic, sexual sense): our pupils dilated, cheeks flushed, drunk on the thrill of the chase.
Pre-covid, I boasted there was no existential ennui that could not be cured by a turn round Zara, while sipping on a disposable cup, meditatively weighing up fabrics. And now? While in theory I long to support our retail industry – not least when the British Fashion Council predicts that half of it may be laid waste – in practice I am grounded. I’m not scared, merely not interested. This barren facsimile of my former joy – with its no-touching, plastic screens, constant scrutiny and quarantining – is so denuded of pleasure as to be not worth the queuing. I looked to my fashion fix to provide a will to live, and the new consumerism just isn’t selling it.
Besides, as fashion has become not so much fast as frenzied, the need for a reset has become impossible to ignore. The high priestess of consumption, Vogue’s Anna Wintour, has felt forced to concede of the corona crisis that, “It is an opportunity for all of us to… think about the waste and the… excess that we’ve all… indulged in.” My cup, my Zara fillip are, like, so over.
After three months cold turkey I have found myself thinking, not: “I am a fashion addict, where’s my next hit?”, rather: “As a responsible citizen, which brands do I want to support?” The answer has been quality-obsessed British labels: fashion fetishist Alexa Chung, tweed gurus Holland & Cooper, and silk and cashmere queen Tabitha Webb. I can source vintage brilliance on Vestiaire Collective, ferret out bargains on Yoox.
Our shops have taken on a Soviet-era joylessness, making virtual purchasing more visceral. The shops will be back, but not in this sheathed and sterile form. Meanwhile, I’ll be sating myself “shopping” in my wardrobe, as the supremely sensuous artist Mona Hatoum once recommended to me – because all of us already have a cornucopia awaiting there.