Shopping isn’t about buying, it’s about snooping, drifting and collaring John Lewis staff...
As if you need to be told, today is the day we can get back to shopping in non-essential shops, or as we like to call it, being human. Some people’s days are punctuated by exercise, coffee breaks, watering the plants – and then there those of us who need to dip into a shop to feel normal. We don’t believe there is any such thing as “non-essential” shopping. We’re essentially hardwired to wander into anywhere that looks like it might be selling with the purpose of looking and touching and smelling and watching and soaking up the ambience, and whether we buy anything is beside the point. Probably we won’t. We’re just in shops, for the following, in our view essential, reasons:
1 Perving on the rich (or ‘mansioning’)
If slumming is hanging out in the poorer quarters, then mansioning is loitering in the places rich people go, without risk of being ejected or having to spend any money. This means shops. You don’t have to dress up to get into Carl Hansen & Søn and ogle the Hans Wegner chairs. You don’t need ready cash to drift around Smythson, the luxury stationer, or to eye up the linen tablecloths in Daylesford. Once upon a time, in the days of the fashion store Voyage, shops operated a club membership policy, and you couldn’t get through the door if you didn’t look like someone worthy of wearing its devore cardigans. Those were the days! But now you’ll hardly ever get treated like a hobo in the shops of the rich and famous (although beware any attempt to try on the six-figure duchess silk dresses).
2 A new perspective on how we look
People assume that we go to shops to try on the clothes in changing rooms. There is a bit of that, but what we really like is an outsider’s perspective – the sales assistant or the woman in the next cubicle or maybe the girl fixing the electrics – doesn’t matter who, we just want a steer from someone who doesn’t have a fully formed opinion about us. When we whisk back the curtain we’re looking for wide-eyed admiration or poorly disguised horror. Sometimes we just want to know what strangers think.
3 An alternative mother-and-daughter spa day
We’ve never been motherand-daughter spa day types. The whole me-time, treatments, pampering and shuffling around in disposable slippers thing is as alien to us as Scientology. But what we like instead is pointless drifting in mostly white shops, with quilted pillows and French mirrors and empty glass bottles, or those other shops that are like luxurious Scandinavian prisons, selling ash benches and individual stainless steel candle holders. That’s our spa day.
4 Coming home to the John Lewis staff
However old you are – even when you’re old enough to have grown-up children with children of their own – there will be times when you feel like collaring a calm, sensiblelooking adult and asking them to help sort out your life. For this we have John Lewis staff, never knowingly not on hand to solve a middle-class domestic crisis such as: which tog factor is best? Do I really need an iron the size of a pit bull? What if the kettle is really noisy? Can you put all the stuff on this laptop on to this new laptop and make it work, and then explain it without asking me for my Apple ID or using the words “cloud” or “hard-drive” or “gigabyte” or “backup”?
5 Taste snooping
There are a few shops where you simply want to drift and absorb the owner’s lifestyle, so you can be more like her. If she’s wearing clogs that’s clogs on the list, if she has a messy ponytail, a small pink coffee cup, a bedlington terrier, a lemon tree – it’s all being filed under selfimprovements.
We want an outsider’s perspective on clothes, whether it’s wide-eyed admiration or poorly disguised horror
Non-essential? Don’t think so.