How we got our teenage thrills? Catalogue shopping
As Argos stops printing its ‘laminated book of dreams’,ms’, Polly Vernon recalls coming of age in the directory era
News that Argos is to cease production of its printed catalogue in favour of an internetonly presence can be considered momentous only in the pre-Covid sense, which is to say: not really momentous at all, and thus, as emotional upheavals go, a lovely change from the ceaselessly heightened, actually momentous drama of 2020.
This might well explain why Twitter responded so passionately to the announcement, made on Thursday, as if the end of this particular paper product wasn’t entirely inevitable (given that the internet is basically one massive catalogue anyway) – and also that most of us had forgotten all about the Argos catalogue, up until the point we learnt it was to cease production.
So it was that #argoscatalogue trended; someone tweeted “never forgotten” along with a photograph of one of the tiny pens Argos used to provide so customers might fill in equally tiny order forms, a former model dug up images of a shoot she’d done years earlier for the catalogue’s sportswear section, many shared comedian Bill Bailey’s set on the “laminated book of dreams” – 15 minutes of high-grade material based entirely on the catalogue’s existence. Everybody else went in for some variation on “noooooooo”, or the broken-hearted emoji.
Over dinner in our favourite just-reopened restaurant, my friend iend reminisced about the silver belcher cher chain she coveted for months aged ged 14 – part of Argos’ signature Elizabeth zabeth Duke jewellery range – and which ch she saved up money from her Eighties ies Saturday job in a bakery to buy, eventually making a victorious trip to Ealing’s branch to claim her prize, the ripped-out catalogue page clutched in one hand for reference.
“My mum used to bring it home before Christmas, and we’d mark up the things we wanted,” the head chef relayed the next day of his feelings for “The Big Book”. “It was amazing!”
For those of us who came of shopping age in the Eighties and early Nineties, catalogues in general – and Argos in particular – represented a true rite of passage: our great consumer awakening. They’d come into our houses, as if by stealth, and range themselves casually around our parents’ coffee tables, then engulf us with formative waves of consumer desire when we least expected it, having only picked one up for a listless flick before Grange Hill. Suddenly, we’d find ourselves, aged nine, mesmerised by the possibilities of owning a sandwich toaster, a footspa, matching luggage. A calculator, the likes and size and functions of which we had never seen! A teasmaid (never mind that we didn’t drink tea).
Catalogue shopping was certainly a significant aspect of my youth. I grew up in the Seventies and Eighties in a small fishing town on the outskirts of Exeter, Devon, a young girl with a burgeoning desire to write and a subscription to
magazine – interrogator of the giddiest, greatest points of Eighties
The arrival of the Next Directory was like a window into another dimension
pop culture; ground zero on my obsessions with song lyrics, clothes and make-up.
While my geographical location was no obstacle to my learning every line of every A-ha song ever released, it leave me several hundred miles short of London’s Kensington Market, which, apparently, was where I needed to be to have any hope of dressing like Yazz of The Plastic Population fame, Bananarama circa or Mel &/or Kim. And how could I do my make-up like the backing dancers in
the video for Robert Palmer’s to Love, or Kim Wilde, or Madonna (obviously)? What was I to do? Where was I to turn? The Avon catalogue, that’s where.
At 14, I secured my first job, which wasn’t a paper round, a as an underaged child minder mi to a local loca four-yearold boy, for w whom I’d s started off b baby sitting, an and ended up nannying ove over the course of a summer holid holiday. I had no id idea what I was d doing, but he didn’t mind, and nor did his parents, apparen apparently; and oh, how the money flooded in! Actual notes, in envelopes, mounting up with gratifying speed, and me, with n nothing to spend it on but mascara of a garish h hue. And gold lipstick. And a peacock blue Kohl pen pencil that would, on my returning to secondary s school, be passed around my form mates during br break time so as to mmore more fairly distribute conjunnctivitis conjunctivitis am among us. I’mnnot I’m not sure pr precisely how I found the Avon catalogue c – thoughh though I’m sure it didn’t involve aan an Avon lady lad doorto-door reepresentat representative – but I rememb remember the giddy rush of a new perus peruse, the yearning for a specific item item, which would quickly transform i into the yearning for three more I’d literally never heard of fi five minutes earlier, but had becom become rapidly convinced I desperate desperately needed.
Next, c came Next. It first opened its doors in Exeter in 1988, and represented a seismic shift in the town’s sensibi sensibilities. Nothing that chic ha had ever happened to us before before. The Next Directory was li like a window into anoth another dimension – one whe where a Devon schoolgirl like me could inhabit a life lifestyle in which wearing an oversized doublebrm breasted blazer with matching high-waisted su suit pants and a white c cotton shirt buttoned a all the way up to my throat, in the style of th the heroine in a Rick Astley video, made m absolute sense. The Next Directory Dir was not merely a selling tool: it was a hardbacked promise of a better life. It was all there, in the swaggering, slightly authoritarian use of the word “directory”; it was definitely all I wanted from my incoming adulthood.
When I, aged just 18, got rather unfortunately run over by a car, fractured my pelvis and was required to stay in hospital for 10 days while it set, my mother brought the Next Directory to my emergency ward bedside, and most uncharacteristically agreed to buy me the pyjama set of my choosing. (I went for satin, off-white).
Argos featured most significantly in my fashion life at a point when I was a fully formed adult of some 28 years, in possession of an increasingly finely attuned sense of style. The first thing I acquired via that catalogue was a vintage-looking men’s Casio digital steel bracelet watch, with which (I find, in retrospect) I was quite correct in being completely obsessed. The second was a personalised name necklace, a style repopularised in the earliest Noughties by Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City fame, a delicate piece of 9ct gold-plated irony, which set me back in the region of £35, which I enjoyed hugely, and am now minded to see if I still possess with a view to a possible style revival.
Apart from sparking. misty-eyed reminiscences of fashion statements past, it’s pretty obvious catalogues serve little purpose – and cause rather too much tree death – to be tolerated much longer. But, hey: it was certainly fun while it lasted.