March 27, 2006
the o'neill building
it is being turned into condos. the building has a website which includes some great historical photos:
www.theoneillbuilding.com
i erred - it is not opposite bad, bath and beyond but a few blocks up.
Is buying a luxury apartment an instance of consumption?
Posted by Leah Strigler at 6:40 PM | Comments (1)
Everything looks nice.
(Miller et al, p. 150.)
Everything looks nice.
When I was in college I spent a summer volunteering at the Landmarks Preservation Commission. I helped to research the buildings contained in the Ladies’ Mile Historic District, so names for its fame as the strip (on Sixth Avenue in Chelsea) that contained the first department stores. The name comes from the practice of female shoppers strolling up and down the avenue, studying the window displays, a recent innovation. Many of the showcase windows are preserved; consider the Barnes and noble store on 22nd or the building which houses Bed, Bath and Beyond. Across from the latter was O’Neill’s, perhaps the most famous store in its day; the name still graces the top of the building. Ladies’ Mile was a shopping destination and a novel shopping experience. [Oddly enough, it was the renovation of this District that brought suburban-style shopping – think of stores like Bed, Bath and Beyond that are mall staples – to New York City, because these original department store buildings offered large spaces at then-reasonable rents.]
Reading the material for today and thinking about shopping while continuing to think about sensory experience, I was struck much more by the extent to which shopping relies on visual stimulation and creative display. I find this to have been, at least in the heyday of Ladies’ Mile, more important, at least in some ways, than branding alone. I think though that today, with viral advertising, Consumer Reports and the Web this no longer holds true in the same way. A history of the evolution of commercial displays would be useful in thinking about these issues. I often wonder how internet shopping will ultimately transform commercial real estate and store design. Some influences seem to be unexpected; for example, who would have predicted that the internet would give used booksellers such a fertile new life and a market reach far beyond their local venues?
Two recent shopping experiences illustrated some of the complexities around shopping and display, both pick up on the “cheapjack” phenomenon.
A few weeks ago Andrea joined me on an impromptu field trip to the wholesale district that extends up Broadway from Madison Square to Herald Square; many of them do sell to the public and do not charge you tax if you pay in cash. You can buy many things in the district: bags, silver jewelry, hats and scarves, Indian clothing, watches. We were there to see the perfume sellers and I specifically was looking for Chanel No. 5. These stores – virtually all of them are worn down and look grimy. Both windows and shelves are crammed with stock, usually without any attempt at artistic display. The perfume products being sold are the real thing – not imitations, although the imitation brands can be found for sale as well – and are sold for much less than department store prices. The one exception to this rule is when these suppliers have stock of discontinues fragrances. Typically, items that are discontinued are exceptionally cheap until a certain “tipping point” is hit, at which time this stock becomes exorbitantly expensive. Such prices can now be confirmed on the internet, which also has a number of perfume discounters, although the district tends to be even cheaper. I am always fascinated by the cheap display of such a luxury item and as well by the absence of tester bottles – shoppers in the district either know the fragrances before they arrive or buy based on brands, recommendations etc.
One of my favorite stores in my neighborhood is going out of business and having a liquidation sale. I stopped in to find out the story and noticed that the experience of being in the store was changed: the bright yellow and red sale signs looked gaudy against the pastel walls and the store had a “cheap” feel to it because the shelves, tables and racks were over-full with stock, which seemed to spill out everywhere and onto the floor. The salespeople, many of whom recognize me as a regular, had also been transformed: they were frowning and harried by the number of shoppers. This store is usually inhabited mostly or entirely by women, but this time there was a male in charge – a representative of the bank handling the bankruptcy. His instructions to the staff – I could hear his voice as I perused the store – added to my sense of discomfort. The store represents a particular brand (April Cornell); the muddying of the store experience made me feel that it was already defunct.
Both of these experiences underscore for me the visual and visceral nature of shopping so well-described in our readings. They also underscored for me, by their subversion of the expected or typical, the extent to which our shopping experiences are constructed by the organization of the public spaces and interactions that constitute the activity of shopping. In the Miller piece (p. 151) there is a description of how some shoppers may regard John Lewis “as at least the best place to start an investigation for goods and prices, even if they intend to purchase goods elsewhere.” My guess would be that this practice has only increased since the advent of the internet, but I wonder what research might exist on this matter. Further, since we have had a few discussions regarding the internet and what elements of it may or may not constitute an “object,” I wonder if we would agree that one can have experienced an object on the internet – without seeing it in three dimensions or touching it. And even if a number of us would say no today, will that seem as evident in the future? The internet is certainly visual, but it is not sensory or social in the same way that stores, shopping malls and, for that matter, design shops and advertising agencies are. I wonder about how definitions of sensory experiences are being shifted by new media and how that affects shoppers’ sensibilities.
Posted by Leah Strigler at 8:09 AM | Comments (2)
March 26, 2006
the mizrahi identity
Isaac Mizrahi was once so highly regarded in the world of design that he had a drag ball house named after him. But in the late 1990’s Chanel closed his actual fashion house, and Mizrahi soon was designing fashion for Target. Having to design clothes that would “fit” and sell at Target as opposed to high-end fashion boutiques required Mizrahi to change the clothes he was making, using less expensive fabrics and lower production costs to massively supply Target stores with thousands of the same articles of clothing. As a result, his clientele completely changed, with an increasingly diverse group of buyers purchasing and wearing his clothes. Mizrahi was able to “bring trends down to a mass level [which are] generally unattainable to the majority of the country (“Isaac Hits the Target” by Ari Bendersky, “The Advocate,” 2003).”
As was repeatedly made clear by the readings, shopping and object-acquisition can understood as creating and enforcing one’s identity. There are an abundance of objects made “generically” to allow for mass consumption, where buyers can identify with a different class (race/ethnic/gender) because they own a version of a product that is usually only consumed by an other-identified group. But what of the designer, the creator and supplier of objects, who changes their design in order to accommodate the new middleman venue? If the designer’s identity, and the object’s identity, are subject to change, then the identity that is constructed is just that – constructed – but it is also an unfixed classification. It no longer means the same thing to the consumer to own a Mizrahi design – and in fact, in a wealthy-identified group, it is considered in poor taste to shop at Target, let alone be wearing Mizrahi. Not only has the venue enacted change upon the design of the object, but it has also in a sense devalued the object as well, along with the designer, along with the identity. While Mizrahi insists that he is now free to design in the way he wants to, without the pressures and obligations that were once constraining him, his new identity is certainly not without limitations. While design often is revered for innovations that improve or elaborate upon an object, Mizrahi is now engaged in design for a reverse affect, but one that culminates in its own kind of rewards.
Posted by Kimberly Brandt at 11:22 PM | Comments (2)
You are what you buy
I remember it being 1985 – driving to the locally owned record store before the words “indie” or “DIY” were being used. I would buy copies of I-D, NME and The Face – swayed by the glossy soviet style graphic and promise of a new wave music subculture that was sorely lacking in Jacksonville, FL, USA. Somehow the Englishness of these magazines made them more alternative or radical, and less under the influence of conservative Reaganism, which permeated even grocery store bags emblazoned with a “Just Say No” message. Particularly, The Face (like Warhol’s Interview or the more fashion oriented Details) offered an aesthetic that felt beyond ordinary, a trendiness that felt accessible and not yet co-opted by the rising popularity of Madonnas and Cyndi Laupers.
The Face was fresh and furious filling a hole in the ‘punk is dead’ alternative music lifestyle that I wanted and promised myself; a sort of site I could head towards when I turned 18 and could leave home a year later. But by that time, I was living in Atlanta, and had met up with a group of young gay men; was cruising the gay discos instead of going to see bands. All we talked about was Bronski Beat and HIV, though not really sure of the definition of either. I never thought of The Face as a men’s style magazine, but there was definitely something gay about it. And it does make sense that I would be drawn to its aesthetic because my world was replete with gay hairdressers, drag queens and fag hags.
And I remember clearly The Face models, pouting non-white feisty boys, who dressed in a collection of Betsy Johnson and thrift store. I got the sense that the UK was more ethnically heterogeneous than the States (though I lived in the South which has a high percentage of African-Americans and ethnicities from the Caribbean and Central/South Americas) or more accurately, that people of color were afforded an equality (even if only aesthetically) that did not translate to the American publishing, media or entertainment spheres. Mort writes that The Face served “to promote the idea of cultural diversity as part of a diaspora of style” and the article made me think about what I was really buying (or buying into) when I bought my monthly magazine. (70) I was buying a political and aesthetic ideal that offered me a hope and potential, beyond the contradictions of my home life and social sphere.
Consumption can have meaningful implications for identity formation (both individual and group) as described by Miller et.al. This article was an interesting companion to Mort’s piece, thinking of the magazine as a type of shopping mall, a way to ascribe to a sub-culture or community or way of being in the world. The idea that an identity like class or race is constructed by what is bought and sold is important to think about as these roles change from generation to generation. Instead of clarifying the boundaries of class the Miller article finds the distinctions nebulous, often described by what the individual is not. Purchasing power and the material world help to articulate the formation of class identity as a process and a becoming.
In this way my purchase of The Face was similar to Hebdige’s example of the negativity of buying into Americanization, this British magazine was my attempt to be distanced from “a predigested set of norms and values.” I attributed meaning to this magazine in order to escape “the knowledge that ‘the fix is in and all that work does is to keep you afloat at the place you were born into.’” (Hebdige, 74) At the time (1985), I was serving fried chicken and biscuits to heavy weight wrestlers and the predominately-white clientele at Beach Rd. Chicken Dinners, but if Miller is right is stating that “identity (functions) as the consequence rather than the precondition for shopping,” then I could escape that hot crowded kitchen someday and buy myself into someone else. (Miller, 189) That mall or that magazine has the potential to be the great equalizer – forget Marxism – it seems that this week the readings offer the hope that a world without sexism, racism, fascism, homophobia and ageism could be on-sale in the bargain basement of Target.
Posted by Pilou Miller at 8:23 PM | Comments (1)
the british way of shopping...
Miller’s description of two shopping malls in Greater London was revealing to me. The phenomenon of cheapjacks seems to be a cross-cultural issue. I have noticed one-dollar-shops in New York, as well as know the equivalents in Germany and throughout Europe. Class seems to be the appropriate category to distinguish different shopping identities based on consumer habits, images of shopping centers, demography and ethnic background. Instead of referring to class as a rather strict structure of Marxist Theory, Miller et al. suggest in their ethnographic study of Wood Green and Brent Cross the idea of class as process (p.137) with a strong emphasis on the relation to the objectified values. The category class is somehow resolved, but at the end of the study, I wonder if old structures do not reenter through the back door.
If class is not a determined social affiliation, but a “self-designation” of an urban identity, one has to question how the individuals construct their identity through shopping. How do they show their social status through the shopping malls they frequent and those they avoid? The authors name one individual who is aware of status differences between Brent Cross and Wood Green, but all the other interviewed persons do not seem to attribute their shopping experience to a mere class experience. It is interesting to find out about the more rational and functional middle-class image of department stores like John Lewis in contrast to Cheapjacks, which are apparently linked to low prices and inferior quality. Linking these attributes back to the consumer’s identity, would suggest to label the Cheapjack-shopper as affiliated to lower class. I argue whether the term “class” is appropriate in the whole ethnographic study. Obviously, there are differences in ethnic background, which determine the goods of shopping as well as the place to shop. Furthermore, the atmosphere in the mall whether encourages shopping desires or evokes negative connotations. These facts are tied to the composition of the neighborhood and how certain ethnic groups construct the “other” to emphasize their own identity as a group and to exclude non-members. This happens with religious aspects (Jewish) as well as with Englishness. Where does class come into play in this configuration? Does a class habitus exist or can be produced? Can pensioners who shop in Cheapjack stores be considered as working-class or simply parsimonious middle-class consumers? Where can we draw the line between working class and middle class at all?
And then again, I wonder how universal the categories of class may be applied to other countries. In Germany, for example, I would have difficulties to label a consumer as being part of lower class or working class, because of where he shops. Discount stores are far from being the distinctive pattern for class, since it became fashionable to stingy with money even for middle class. Then, the John Lewis-phenomenon might be explained in terms of British traditions and is not easy transferable to other cultural contexts.
Even more nation specific seems to be the British fear of leveling-down-processes through the Americanization of the British Society. A nation fights for its aesthetic and social positions. The threat through homogenization of cultural issues of leveling high (bourgeois) culture and popular (working class) culture is a European phenomenon, not only of the 1960s but even more in times of connoting globalization negatively with Americanization. No doubt, this creates stereotypes of the “other” which cannot be explained easily with design forms. Furthermore, objects seem to be adopted ideologically. They perform in political contexts and seem to be labeled at any time.
Posted by Teresa Reiber at 3:59 PM
What about online shopping?
Miller et al had me rather entertained, as though I were watching the Discovery Channel of social science, and I applaud them for that. Shopping and identity making through purchasing practices is one of those topics that a person (me) can really feel a sense of kinship with. Does one admit to shopping somewhere that is too nice/expensive/pretentious for a sociology grad student like Intermix or Sigerson Morrison? Does one admit to shopping at places with notoriously bad labor practices? How do we feel about the overt sexual exploitation going on in the advertisements for American Apparel which is also known for hiring American workers at American wages rather than hiring young teenagers for very little in Southeast Asia? Is shopping for the same product at Zabar’s rather than the corner deli meaningful? I think so (just watch out for the grumpy people who would strongly prefer you to shop at the corner deli so they could have more unfettered access to the salmon roe). So is identity made in part through shopping? I guess I would have to strongly agree.
So I agree with Miller et al and I grant them their attempts to complicate identity by throwing in a little race/gender/age/ethnicity work. But then I was wondering, what happens when we shop online? Online retailers clearly agree with Miller et al as well; they know we make ourselves through our purchases and refuse to be just any old online venue. The webiste bluefly (a site that exists ONLY online) sends out shopping bags with whatever it is that you order. That’s right, the box comes to your home and inside is the product you ordered and a shopping bag to carry it around in. Where would you be carrying it? Certainly not home from the store, it’s already home. But the deal with bluefly is that they sell big name designer wear for much cheaper than, say, bloomingdales. So, would a person want to admit they got those Chanel pumps at bluefly or are they using their online shopping behaviors to obscure the retail location altogether? Are we identifying with our amazon.com just as much as we would if it were a tangible physical location or do we segregate our shopping behavior in ways that allow us to maintain an identification with specific retail locations (the Soho Bloomingdales, the Crate and Barrel on Madison, the deli next to H&H) while we seek the savings or convenience of having materials delivered to our doors that online shopping allows? Do people go to the Soho Bloomies to see what’s cool, get the experience of that tangible location, and then go home and order the things they liked on bluefly? Then are they bluefly or bloomies shoppers? Can they choose to identify with the bloomies shopping experience and sort of brush bluefly under the rug? This would then suggest that online shopping is more or less invisible, ghosting alongside tangible shopping experiences in actual physical spaces. But I don’t think that satisfactorily explains what is going on. I have seen people carrying those bluefly bags around on the subway, so they must not be ashamed of their shopping habits, to say the least. The thing about the internet is that there is no easy way to find the new “hot” online retailer the way it might be easy to find a new boutique because it moves in right next door to the places you already shop. So online shopping is at some kind of advantage because it can play on the “in the know” exclusivity that comes from having to be sought out or specially discovered. Even if the site has a high volume of sales, it can still “feel” like an exclusive boutique if it chooses to—it can be the ikea of designer jeans and still make customers feel like they have found a special place to access unique brands.
With reference to race/ethnicity/age discrimination online shopping is in an ambivalent spot. On the one hand, interactions mediated through the computer allow users and retailers alike to create as much or as little identity as they like. There will be no security guards trailing young or racially “othered” shoppers around (unless you could cookies and spyware). On the other hand, online shopping is contingent on getting online in the first place. The very old probably don’t do a lot of online shopping, nor do the people who can’t afford a computer and internet connection in the first place, which is correlated with racial background.
I can’t imagine that consumers are willing to give up consumption as a part of their identity making and I am sure they will come up with ways to make identity through online shopping. I am not sure quite how—probably not so much by carrying bluefly bags around. Maybe through the personal customization cataloging that computerized databases do so well. I can have wish lists and previously purchased lists for every online venue at which I shop, and their memory will not fade over time. When I used to use freshdirect, I had automatically generated shopping lists available at any time. Barnes and Noble.com tells me what I might like to read, and they are surprisingly accurate. If I could get clothing sitees to remember my size and color preferences, we’d really be in business. But how do people communicate this kind of consumption identity making? It is happening online, onscreen so how will it move offline and off screen? Because I study myspace and it’s ilk, I tend to think that our online profiles will start to carry traces of our online shopping behaviors. People will be able to link to my bn.com wish list through myspace. They will be able to see my favorite stores, online and off, just by logging in to my virtual self on myspace, and not just the stores, but the things I purchased and the things I want to purchase.
Posted by Laura Noren at 3:52 PM | Comments (1)
where can i get a few cans of berry pink?
instead of trying to form links between various readings as we have been encouraged to do, i have decided to encourage myself to form links between readings and the object i have chosen to do my paper on, spray paint. this is more fun for me and is productive in forming my ideas about my object and collecting readings from the course which i can apply to my object in the term paper. i only wish i had been consciously doing this all along instead of merely making notes to myself on which readings i felt i could apply to my object. so here goes nothin...
the venues and middlemen section of harvey's book immediately brought spray paint to mind for me. of course im always thinking about spray paint, so thats nothing new. but what struck me was how i and other users of spray paint are at the mercy of what paints, and particularly colors, are avaiable to us in stores. it seems unfair that our artistic expression is constrained by the poor selection of such nefarious retailers as the home despot. it seems it would be so much more convenient for us if they, at the least, stocked all of the available colors in the brands they carry. the popular brand that all stores carry is Rustoleum, and its sub-brands. of course we are constrained by the range of colors that Rustoleum itself manufactures, but even worse, we can't even get our hands on the colors Rusto does manufacture because the buyers for home despot don't think people will buy certain colors. among the most desired and most difficult to obtain colors manufactured by Rusto under the sub-brand Painter's Touch is the elusive Berry Pink. well what would a macho man like me want with a sissy color like pink? i can't explain without photographic demonstration how much berry pink helps one's graffiti pop out of a bland and drab concrete wall or a dull rusting freight train. however since the biggest and most widely dispersed sources of spray paint like home despot, wal-mart or k-mart dont carry this valued can of $3 paint, its pretty difficult to get ones hands on one. however, there is one retail store that sells berry pink, a small arts and crafts chain. however the chain does not have very many branches and the ones it does have are dispersed in inconvenient suburban locations along the eastern seaboard. there are no branches on the west coast at all. sucks for the left coasters. and the ones out here are at least a 30 minute drive from anywhere. which is why i have to drive 30 minutes and pay from $6-20 in tolls (depending on the route) to get to this little chain store to get some cans of berry pink. unfortunately, as is often the case, the store only stocks a half dozen to a dozen cans at a time, so when i finally arrive in some little town in new jersey to make my purchase, someone else has already beat me to it and stolen the whole lot of them. so i end up going next door in the strip mall to the home despot to get the usual sunrise red and harbor blue instead.
Posted by Robert Weide at 3:44 PM | Comments (2)
Place and Dread
Place this week takes our focus. Specifically, places of shopping are fused with identity in Miller’s writing, whereas Harvey fuses place with product. On these two ideas, a couple of skepticisms follow.
I read Harvey in saying that venues have a determinant effect on the shape of goods. Then I wonder if we can come up with some counterfactuals. What goods have a physical life of their own that is immune to the effects of shelf constraints, media attention, and retailer niches? This may be a way of rephrasing one of the first puzzles to come up in seminar, the difference between totally utility-purpose objects versus their opposite total symbolic goods. Is a screw or a paper clip, for instance, insulated from the importance of location?
Regarding Miller and shopping: I appreciate his attempts to ground the floating discourse of class into the material world. From this approach, he seems to be moving us out of the reifying sociological “armchair” and into a realm where class materializes as practice and process. This happens in concrete places of stores and malls, where people shop for class, so to speak. Social relations are made and solidified through consumption, and the store is a place of identity formation. But I was hesitant about ethnic identity formation through shopping, because it seems to brush over the power difference between race and ethnicity. Differently raced groups have unequal freedoms to choose their identity. He notes the unequal constraints of racist discourse, but this seems to be an important limitation on shopping as identity-making, or at least it points to the political plane of shopping.
Lastly, I get a sense of consumers’ anxiety in late modernity with all of this freedom to choose identity through practice like shopping. With what Hebdige calls Americanisation, there is a sense of democratization of taste. With his “leveling down,” there is also an opening up of choices. This must worry consumers, who have more chances to get it wrong without having fixed, ascribed identities. But it is also interesting to ponder how producers experience these changes. In the new consumer society, rapid turnover amplifies demand uncertainty, and producers are faced with considerable anxiety, if not dread, similar to the spiritual despair Danish philosopher Kierkegaard termed angst. In existentialist philosophy, dread results from mankind’s freedom to fulfill spiritual responsibilities to God, but each new freedom to choose for ourselves brings increased chances of failure. Dread has no precise object like fear, but it is the fear of nothing. Producers, those thought to hold power and control over consumers, are faced with a dread of possibility, a dread of failing to choose correctly that which is always uncertain. Consumers and producers alike are bound together, faced with the dreadful task of making and buying the right identity.
Posted by Ashley Mears at 2:42 PM | Comments (1)
“This was not a place for her” -
concludes Sandra, after her friend, Diedre, a working-class woman, attended the fancy shopping mall across the street for the first time. I loved Sandra’s comment and I guess we are all familiar with this feeling of “this place is just so not for us.” But then what makes a place right for us? Do consumers choose right places or do places choose the right consumers? The articles for this week suggest that these two social processes happen simultaneously. What we find is that places / objects and identities constantly and mutually shape each other.
I found Miller’s article on shopping malls and identities very interesting. It was fascinating to see the class / identity differentiation between two malls, seemingly so similar, socially so different. I could not help but thinking of the shopping malls in Budapest which opened a year or two after the fall of Communism. It was a brand new thing, something that most Hungarians never even heard of and all of a sudden it was there, in the heart of the city – paradise comes true. What was interesting is that very soon it established its own class-based subcultures, similarly to the two shopping malls in Britain; with the difference that while in Miller’s survey different classes chose to shop in different malls, here the consumers had to find their own space within a single mall. It was primarily functionality that decided on the place division: those young people (similarly to the Cypriots in England) who use mall as a social place for hanging out, eating out, going to the movies, are usually in the back of the mall where the food court, the main square and the movies are (and interestingly enough some cheap and no brand clothing stores also opened there); whereas those middle and upper-middle class consumers who primarily (and often exclusively) come to the mall to shop are to be found on the other floors. These days there are five more malls in the city of Budapest, and each of them has a similar character; all classes attend them regularly, only for different purposes.
Looking at the two classes (working-class and middle-class) separately, we see how the mall shapes and underpins identity at the same time. The mall basically constructs the identity of those young people (from lower classes) who spend all their time in there. This is where they see what the latest fashion is, the mall even established some cheap shops in their “corner,” as I mentioned above, and the only cultural influence they experience in their lives besides school happens in the local movies, presenting only Hollywood films. At the same time, those consumers who attend the more elegant shops are a lot more class-conscious in the sense that they know exactly what brand they want to purchase, the brand that matches their social status.
I think this is the 'Americanization' Hebdige describes in his essay "Towards a Cartography of Tastes," although what meant 'Americanization' in the 1960s is globalization today. Britain's greatest fear was that the effect of Americanisation would erase the local, historical identity, which could also endanger the national identity of those tiny Eastern European countries. Nevertheless, I believe that since both the national tradition and the global culture feeds into this newly constructed identity, local identities still differ from each other.
The article for this week present two different ways in which society shapes cultural / ethnic / class identity: one takes place in the shopping malls the other is mediated by mass mediums (Mort’s “Cultural Authority of Style). What we find in contemporary society is that these two seemingly separate ‘places’ often mutually feed into each other. For instance, women’s magazines in Hungary only advertise clothing which one can purchase in the shopping malls. Naturally, the magazines and the shops of upper-middle class also permanently interact with each other, however, what I find fascinating is the similarity of style and layout; the elegance and the spaciousness both magazines and stores share. I think this (perhaps loosely) relates to Harvey’s description of how the layout and look of the venues influence our choices of consumption. (Although, I have to say that my favorite part in the Chapter is when Harvey is describing how “we enjoy watching others make their choices” 133. So true and it not only influences our shopping habits, but also our identity.)
I also would like to point out that the shopping mall is often the location of ‘displaced meaning,’ and attending the mall may allow customers to cross social (boundaries) and reach out for that which is displaced by one’s own social class. I was a bit surprised of Miller’s “black and white” analysis of the two malls, where the borderlines seemed to be so clear and every member of the society seemed to know where she or he belonged (sorry for this exaggeration).
P.S. Harvey, thanks for the paragraphs on gift buying. It was so inspiring for my moneyclip project!!!
Posted by Aniko Szucs at 2:29 PM | Comments (1)
Shopping for an Identity
I’m really not one for shopping. I do it out of necessity. Vary rarely do I get the urge to just go shopping for the hell of it. It does happen when I pass by a thrift store, because like the ‘cheapjacks’ of Millers article, their spontaneity of the available calls to me. Later I think I’ll have more to say about this in relation to Owen’s post. Following Jane’s argument I think my motivation to not shop is strictly political. Taking a bit from Pilou’s post last week and Mark’s this week about their ideas of consuming locally and our discussion about Naomi Klein’s work on brands I can scrape together my identity. Buying local and supporting businesses with you dollar as a customer can have an impact on people’s livelihood all around the world. With this belief and my frivolous shopping habits, what kind of identity can I really have in our modern consumer society?
Without a brand on my shirt for everyone to see, how will they know what to think of me? I am a person without an identity. I could wear a giant scarlet A around to stand for anti-shopper. If I’m never seen in a department store what does that say about 1) my identity as a modern man 2) how people will view me.
If people see me in a store or see me reading a ‘general men’s magazine’ I become identified as part of a community, in turn have an identity. But when I’m not engaged in reading my men’s magazine or shopping at a designer store people have no idea who or what I am. My identity then becomes solely based not on what I’m reading or where I am but what I’m wearing. This statement puts a lot of weight on fashion and clothes, almost too much. But I feel the readings for this week do the same. I understand we live in a consumer society but really how powerful is it. What is the importance? These are my first thoughts and feelings.
Then I stop and look at my own beliefs and actions. All my personal convictions are best expressed through my shopping habits, my choices as a consumer. This may also be a comment on the current political climate in America and my feelings as a citizen in a democratic state with no voice, but that’s another issue. I choose not to consume meat. I have an identity as a vegetarian, hippie, liberal. I choose to buy clothes at thrift stores or limit my purchases from department stores. I’m labeled as hipster, creative, liberal. The problem I see as shopping as identity is that it is purely visual, we have no idea what the reasoning is behind people’s consuming habits. As I’m a child of the 80’s and 90’s I am in no position to really argue with other people’s consumer choices. You can consume what you like, but at the end of the day you will be judged and stereotyped into a group like everyone else.
Owen’s example of Goodwill brings up an issue I’ve been battling with throughout the semester. Generally we’ve been thinking of society as a network, and to investigate an issue we’ve needed a starting place to base the rest of our investigation. I understand that his example was just that an example, but it shows one major flaw in this type of approach. All views and aspects of an issue may not be accessible from the place one starts. And I don’t think it’s based on lack of research or intensity of investigation. My concern comes from Gell’s discussion of perception we read about a few weeks ago. I would be happy hear comments on this or discuss it further in class.
Posted by Jean-Luc Howell at 1:43 PM | Comments (1)
Measuring Inequality
The only idea that I have for this week is that we could measure inequality in a country by inequality in the types of stores present, not present, and in which people shop. It would be a nice addition to Gini coefficient or some other well-known measure.
Miller and his buddies show that people classify stores according to the quality and organization of goods (and knowledge). On one hand you have a John Lewis with good quality goods, clear boundaries between them, and knowledgeable personnel while cheapjacks are almost its exact opposite. As Slovenia experienced transition from socialism to capitalism so it did an introduction of a cheapjack. In Slovenia itself during socialism the offering in terms of consumer goods and types of stores was homogenous, same national brands, one or few for each type of a product (almost no competition), and the stores were of the same type. People went across the border mainly to buy clothing and technical things like TVs but everybody was subject to same shopping experience in Italy and Austria. It was in early 90s that cheapjacks appeared on the Italian border. They were on the Italian side and offered much cheaper, often low quality, and simply piled up food articles. They also had the same trick as Miller’s cheapjacks of having some goods exceptionally cheap and others at the same price as at more expensive stores. At the same time within Slovenia we got more differentiation in terms of clothing and technical merchandise but the food stores were still offering was still homogenous. This good quality (and not that cheap) food was also offered by foreign competitors who came to Slovenia. However, in the late 90s we got a food store that was of a cheapjack type. Curiously enough my impression is that it is still the only one in the capital, it is not present in towns and I don’t know about cities other than the capital. Another thing that we got in late 90s was a one-dollar-store but is also fairly rare. In addition to that stores with luxury goods are also very rare. Those few stores that look fancy by themselves and that have luxury goods carry only a few articles so the choice is quite poor.
When comparing Slovenia to some other countries that experienced transition or US it has less inequality in terms of goods offered and the types of stores offering them. There is also no spatial segregation when it comes to types of stores. For the most part there are only fairly expensive, good quality goods that I am not sure how people can afford to buy (well actually I have some ideas but it is time to end this response).
Posted by Miodrag Stojnic at 1:21 PM | Comments (1)
A Few of My Favorite Things....
No trenchant summary here.
1. It is a sign that I'm fighting a cold that things blur and blend in my mind. I felt excited to read Harvey's chapter because I thought it was entitled, "Venus and the Middlemen" (not "venues). And I started thinking of that armless sculpture at the Louvre and wondered how she fit in with shopping. And when I saw the designer juicer photo, for a moment, because it was on the same page with the condom discussion I wondered about fitting a condom on a juicer. And in Hebidge when he says a "‘cartography of taste' might be developed." I read a "cartography of waste." This is how my mind works.
2. The phrase, "the advent of ‘obligation-free browsing' by about 1800" (Molotch 135) brought to mind its opposite, the idea that looking once had a con-commitant responsibility. What does that mean? Looking=buying? This for some reason brought to mind Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and with it the idea that attending to an object (however small) has an effect on the object. This came up again in an altered form in Miller where he talks about Marxism--that it "radically altered the very phenomena it was intended to analyze." (136) In other words, without any drugs at all, just by the act of getting sick, I enter an altered state.
3. More on Molotch: for the first time I saw how strange it is that one of the chief income sources in a commodity-based economy is gift-buying. How odd it is that capitalism has sucked in the gift-economy. You're buying things in order to give them in order to create a non-financially-based obligation based on the exchange of goods without charge....
4. Maybe a punnier pun than "goods and bads" is the pun of "goods and means."
5. I loved Molotch p. 147 where the inaccessibility of essential buying information about relatively necessary goods was listed.... It amazed me.
6. Dick Hebdige quotes Walter Benjamin, a man whose writings always seem important and at the same time stop my brain cold. Mystified. The transition from art based on "ritual" to art based on "politics" means what exactly? I need to pull out that essay. What does he mean by art based on politics? Isn't it more art based on class that Hebidge starts to talk about? Where does politics fit?
7. Irrelevant aside: Reading about British culture, I couldn't help remembering how adorable the little MG sports cars and the little Triumph sports cars used to be. Do you remember? And they were notoriously unreliable. Spiritual fore-runners of the mini. Actually, contemporaries of the Mini thenny? But the Mini then meant something different.
8. When I read of Waugh's fellow who is "Shocked by a bottle of bad wine, an impertinent stranger or a fault in syntax" I thought of Diana Vreeland, the former editor of Vogue saying that vulgarity is a necessary antidote to good taste, that vulgarity spices things up and keeps them interesting.
9. Is a Milk Bar a diner?
10. Has someone else written about "crude technological determinism"? That's relevant to something else I'm thinking about but don't know who the Ur-folks are on that issue. I think I need to read Gramsci. I am afraid.
11. For some reason his discussion of workers "locked into a closed circuit of production and consumption" reminded me of the Houdini trick where he had himself tied up in rope knots (were they those knots that tighten as pressure is exerted on them?) and then put in a bag and tossed in a river. Are we going to pull ourselves out of this one? Hebidge really interested me. After I post this, I'm going to see if I can find the book cheap.
12. For some reason, Mort's summary of Robert Elm's philosophy, "Good things looked good." (42) struck me as the absolute center of the consumer problem. If we weren't so dupe-able, if we didn't believe that the things we saw were good (separate from the horrendous price often exacted from the environment and the people who made them), it wouldn't be so easy for us to dreamily buy them.
Posted by Andrea Siegel at 12:33 PM | Comments (1)
You are where you shop
The ability of a place of consumption to both reflect and engender a sense of identity is at the center of these readings. Place can defined either as an individual store or as a larger geographic unit with a sort of aesthetic/cultural coherence (this latter definition including everything from a shopping mall or district to cities and beyond). I find the assertion by Miller, et. al, (p. 157), that consumption plays an ever increasing role in identity construction due to the increasing instability of occupational bases, especially provocative.
The styling of a store plays a central enough role in the consumption experience that stores selling more-or-less the same thing at the same price can be perceived of differently. Some of this can come down to the aesthetics of the store itself – why people may prefer Barnes & Noble over Borders, or Virgin over Tower, for instance (or shopping online versus either).
There’s another level of differentiation here, though: that between national/international stores and locally-owned ones. Much of this is related to an idea that locally-owned stores are ‘better’ than multinationals – the owners remain local and shopping at these stores means that money you’re spending is going back to a neighbor rather than a CEO sitting in a solid gold house on a private island somewhere.
This of course is filled with complications: what does one make of a local store that goes national? Did the meaning of the Borders Books and Music in Ann Arbor (where I believe it started) change once the chain expanded throughout the country? Nationalism can also play a role – living in Toronto for a couple of years, I was struck by a number of chains seemingly founded to provide a Canadian counterpart to an American one: Second Cup (started in suburban Toronto) to Starbucks; Mr. Sub to Subway, etc.
In addition to any social ‘good’ perpetuated by shopping at local stores, there is also a sense that locally-owned stores are more responsive to their actual clientele. Music stores are a prime example: many of them cater to a specific type of clientele, whereas the larger chains try to be all things to all consumers. Oftentimes, there is a self-conscious organizational obscurity. Other Music, on 4th Street, for instance, does not have the ‘pop/rock’, ‘classical’, ‘R&B’ designations that a place like Tower (across the street) has. Instead, its music categories include: ‘in’, ‘out’, ‘la decadanse’, and ‘then’. This is also reminiscent of the infamous ‘directors wall’ in some video rental stores that serves the double role of helping videophiles find what they’re looking for and hindering anyone else from doing the same.
The neighborhood experience itself is also central to consumption-related identity formation. For example one small portion of Chicago’s North Side (as of 1999, so I’m probably out of date here), had multiple micro-neighborhoods that managed to cater to the same demographic ‘class’ group (defined loosely as upper-middle class white professionals and students) while at the same time breaking that class multiple ways: Wrigleyville (with Wrigley Field and innumerable sports bars) sat just to the south of Boys Town (home of Gay Mart), just to the north of Belmont Street (which had used record stores and clothing shops for aspiring punks), and just to the east of Southport (which had the Music Box Reparatory Theater, and attracted the sort of ‘arty’ crowd that seeks out video stores with director’s walls).
This relates both to Sharon Zukin’s descriptions of shopping districts in Harlem and Fulton Street Mall (in Brooklyn) and Miller’s account of how spaces are defined from both the inside (by their users) and the outside (non-users). As a recent New York Observer has argued (“Beloved Fulton Mall Fights for Existence vs. Boerum-geoisie” – February 20, 2006), the financial profitability of Fulton Street Mall has not ended attempts to redevelop the space to something more 'suitable' to the generally white residents that have moved into the area over the past decade.
Posted by Mark Treskon at 11:13 AM | Comments (1)
March 24, 2006
Shopping as an Identity Practice
Shopping is a practice in identity. Where we shop, how we buy, what objects we induct into our lives, and what meanings these activities have become part of the “stuff” from which we form and assert our identities. And just as identity is complex in our global world, so too are these practices by which we construct it. There is no one-to-one correlation between identities and place. There is no Abercrombie identity. Rather, shoppers as agents actively incorporate diverse meanings of place into their notions of self, bending and molding what these places of consumption mean for them.
The readings this week were excellent in portraying the nuances of shopping as an identity practice. The stores like Target, Anthropologie, and John Lewis attempt to create a shopping atmosphere that conveys a certain type of identity. However, individual shoppers appropriate these identities in different ways. They may buy into the shop’s proffered identity wholesale. Or they may engage in “bad faith” shopping, purchasing goods from stores to which they don’t identify for practical or ironical reasons. Stores and their locations can become mapped to other social categories like race, class, gender, ethnicity, etc. Shopping at one particular store can say more about a person’s identification with an ethnicity than their identification with the store. Likewise, the same chain can have different meanings or connotations depending on its geographic location. The only way to dig through the complexity and morass is through meticulous observation and empirical work. There can be no general theory of shopping identity practices. Rather, it is a highly contextualized act.
The Miller et al readings got me to thinking about the diverse ways in which a single store can be “used” in constructing identities. The Goodwill is an excellent example. I have always been struck by the insistence of my hipster friends to announce their “finds” at thrift stores like the Goodwill or the Salvation Army. If you offer a compliment, they immediately narrate the arduous journey they went through to find it, triumphantly proclaiming the absurdly low price for which they paid for the good. Sometimes they enter into this rant without any solicitation. While tiresome, these exegeses on the art of finding a gem in thrift stores points to the way that this particular segment of the population – well-educated, middle class, urban twentysomethings - appropriates the Goodwill into their identities. Shopping there means resisting the generic consumer culture and materialist values while still remaining hip and fashionable. Also, because the clothes are old and no longer mass produced, these Goodwill shoppers assert some uniqueness and individuality. Being able to find hip clothes at thrift stores melds seamlessly into their understanding of themselves as creative, liberal, young urbanites.
Contrast this appropriation of the Goodwill with the use of it by poorer communities. For them the Goodwill offers not so much an aesthetic or an ability for resistance but represents a practical necessity. They shop here not to find unique diamonds in the underprivileged rough, but rather because the price of the goods fits their budget. For them, the low cost of Goodwill may no longer be shiny badge that they wear to display their superior shopping skills. It may become a source of stigma. Same store, different identity.
It is not enough to say that where we shop matters to who we are. We need to closely examine the dynamic relationship between self and place. People do not passively adopt the identities that stores offer; they play with these meanings and appropriate them in creative ways. This agency may just compensate for the widely-perceived homogenizing forces of the market. The market may want us to share similar consumer identities, but we can always resist these through the way we consume them.
Posted by Owen Whooley at 11:44 PM | Comments (1)
Shopping as a Political Act
I had a belated epiphany with these readings. In our society, shopping is an activity that we cannot opt out of. So, rather than thinking of shopping as frivolous or value neutral, oppressive or liberating, I would like to suggest that we first understand shopping as an activity that is essentially political. This is something that comes up in the Hebdige reading in his discussion of Americanisation, but is much more subtle than his account can be credited for. Hebdige points out that “subordinate groups have been assimilated and won over by ‘passive consumerism’ to dominant modes of thought and action” (67). This point seems to imply that consumers are not active in claiming consumption as a political project, or that they are somehow cultural dupes, being convinced to adopt mainstream consumer activities. Before we wage critiques of homogeneity and Americanisation, we should take a step back and acknowledge that some groups are denied the privilege of assimilation in the first place. History shows us how consumption has been taken seriously politically and claimed as a right by subordinate groups. One of the main battles of the civil rights movement was over the notorious Southern lunch counter. Furthermore, this battle was not over only the right to consume, but was waged in a space (to draw on Miller et al and Molotch) that had important meaning: the site of shopping situates how people relate to objects, and other consumers.
Hebdige begins his discussion of Americanisation by pinpointing it as a process of oppression writ large: cultural imperialism, colonialism, and a political economy of changing markets (from production based to consumer based, for example). In outlining different trends in consumption (teenage consumption, streamlining) and describing the ideological battles waged over consumption and authenticity, I can’t help but think of consumption as a form of identity politics. In some respects, these claims to authenticity are made to exclude certain groups (this is certainly not a novel point), but as shown with the civil rights example, consumption can also be used as a vehicle to gain access to once restricted venues and identities.
This line of thinking is also applicable to the Mort readings. A key issue that comes through in this selection is not only the right to consume, but also the right to be consumed. In attempts to capitalize on this new market of men, marketers and producers are acknowledging men’s right to be consumers. What was especially interesting was Mort’s account of Petri, and his visual marketing campaigns. Mort theorizes that “his images worked to destabilize masculinity by invoking the power of homosocial relations” (73). So what we have here is an instance of homosexuality being consumed through marketing. What we don’t have is an account of gay men as consumers. So, in trying to understand the relationship between citizenship and consumerism, I wonder how this dichotomy of consumer/consumed works across different social groups.
Posted by Jane Jones at 4:39 PM | Comments (8)
IKEA as an Objectification of Multifarious Senses of Identity
As many other Scandinavians, I love going to IKEA, the Swedish furniture retailer that Professor Molotch presented in “Venues and Middlemen” as an example of a “big box” business hitting it big by manufacturing “knock-down” goods (141). You go there with family or friends, look at furniture and accessories, try sofas out for size, perhaps you wind up buying something perhaps you don’t, you can dine dead cheap on Swedish specialties in their restaurant, and one of the latest additions to the IKEA concept is that they now have little delis where you can buy things like frozen Swedish meatballs and semi-baked cinnamon buns to bring home as enjoyable little souvenirs.
What I have just described sounds unmistakably similar to the museum experience, and I admit it does so in part because I want the two experiences to be more or less similar. You see, I have an ongoing fascination with IKEA, and so far my attempts to uncover my own and other people’s pleasure in going there comes down to IKEA offering many of the same components and facilities that you find in many contemporary museums, which boast with being the locus of multiple activities.
Of course IKEA can be considered a department store of sorts, and in that respect I realize my perspective on it is not all that original. Nevertheless, Professor Molotch’s and Daniel Miller et al.’s texts gave me some food for thought in terms of developing or perhaps simply substantiating my sadly unoriginal little thesis. So here goes.
If you have ever been to IKEA you will know that even though it relies on the idea of self-service as well as the location of goods according to category, they still have these little islands of interior decorator bliss, where they present how all these different categories can mount up and be combined into for example a living room, an office space or a dorm room. What is interesting, in my opinion, about all these articulations of spaces with particular styles and purposes, is that they in tune with Daniel Miller et al, can be seen as objectifications of various senses of identity. In short there are so many styles and tastes represented, that you are bound to find at least one or two that you identify positively with.
Since I have not lived in the US for that long and hardly know any Americans, I feel unable to propose how people here have embraced IKEA. In Scandinavia however, I am a bit more on solid ground. What is interesting about IKEA up north in relation to “class as process” or as “practice”, is that although it is incredibly inexpensive, its audience is very heterogenerous in terms of socioeconomic background – or at least as heterogenerous as it gets in Scandinavia! People who have a predilection (and the money) for design classics and pricy contemporary stuff, seem perfectly ok with assembling an IKEA bookcase in the presence of their Eames lounger. And on the opposite pole, students with no money decorate their entire small apartments with hand-me-downs interspersed with a little IKEA here and there.
The heart of the matter is, however, that IKEA with all these things, displays and activites going on are creating an atmosphere where you by no means feel that you are being rushed out. You can spend hours upon hours on walking around seeing things and being seen, shopping and choosing an identity. In other words, it is the optimal place for realizing “class as process/practice”.
To me it seems you get many of the pros and not so many of the cons of the museum experience, and subsequently IKEA is a much more interesting place for creating your identity than for example the museum, which strikes me as far more categorized - metaphorically speaking. No one expects you to be particularly quiet at IKEA, you can touch things and sit on them, the food is cheaper, you get to be with your family and spend time doing something, the employees do not hover over your head, it is free if you do not buy anything, and you can leave your kids to be babysat in a “fun-park”. In short there is much more space for creating your identity than in the museum, and what tops it all off is that you can still survey which people are buying what, and thus make clear whom you yourself differ from or resemble. No, actually what really tops it off is that there is a certain work ethic connoted with shopping furniture. It is not self-indulgent like buying clothes and toys, because furniture is like…and island of stability. Hurrah.
I am not really sure what to make of the other two readings in relation to my musings above though. I suppose IKEA becomes interesting in that it can be seen as a venue that embraces new markets while holding steadfast on to the established. So the countercultural or the subversive is also an identity that is made available to the consumer. And I suppose there is something incredibly camp about the entire enterprise as well...and transgressive. But all in all I do not sense there is an authority of style at IKEA…or is there? It might actually be an interesting site for laying out a cartography of taste.
Posted by Sarah Carlson at 12:02 AM | Comments (1)
March 19, 2006
Cultural authority of style and marketing
With the readings of the thread on “Shopping, Choosing, and Identity,” I can reach to some questions in my final project. Frank Mort’s notion of “cultural authority of style” and Molotch’s (should I say Harvey’s?) study of marketing of objects give good insight on my study of condoms in the gay male community.
Mort tells a history of men’s magazine, and the struggle that some creators faced in trying to invent such a publication deriving from the women’s model. The Face, which was a very small entreprise, had much more success than the attemps of large producers, perhaps because it was not simply a marketing attemp to target a collectivity of men that does not really exist. By trying to document style in a more integrated approach, they could acquire their cultural authority. In queer groups (as in other social subgroup) there is also institutions and people that have cultural authority and some who do not. In gay male consumer culture, a lot of the people that make profit are people that have some authority on style, often because they are groups that started their lucrative activity as a growth from their social/sexual activities (whether we talk about shop owners, porn producers, magazine editors, etc.) Shops destined to gays and lesbians are often “gay-owned” and customers favour them for that reason. However, to get to the subject of condoms, the people that market them are usually not those who have the cultural authority of style in the gay community.
Molotch gives a broad look at the merchandising of goods, and how can influence the conception of the objects themselves. This chapter forces me to ask what, in detail, is the merchandising of the object I chose to study, how the marketing affects the item, why is it such, and what could it be. Wheter condoms are sold in boxes at the pharmacy, in specialized shops where they are presented and where you can touch them, or on websites where you can look at pictures and buy them discreetly, their marketing seems never to be directed towards gay men. For example, even if websites such as www.condom.com and www.gaycondoms.com exist, their merchandise is the same (with many items labelled as giving more pleasure “for her” and pictures of women on some boxes). It would seem logical that such an item be revised and market for the niche of gay consumers, but in the present picture, this item is widely disregarded by those who have the cultural authority in queer communities.
Posted by Etienne Meunier at 8:40 AM | Comments (1)