Going shopping was, for more than a century, much more than a transaction. It was a weekend plan, a family walk, a way to get in touch with the new and belong. The department stores marked stations on the calendar (Christmas, liquidations, season change) and turned the city into the scene of desire and abundance. Then they came The shopping malls, where the experience acquired a controlled climate, with coffees, cinemas and stained glass until late.
Today the habit changed the skin: the click replaced part of the route, the stores function as showroom and even the viral queues for a product are part of the show. However, Physical purchase resists as an urban rite. That transformation is what portrays Mercedes Cebrián in “Estimated clientele ” (Siruela)a book that looks with nostalgia and precision how the way of buying was changing.
A whole culture
In their time, department stores were much more than spaces to buy. Rather, they inaugurated a way of living the city and were the first major revolution of urban consumption. There he bought and also walked, he looked, he learned what fashion was and what progress meant. “A city in Spain was an important city when it had its English Court”, Highlights Cebrián.
In Buenos Aires, The Harrods of Florida Street He also condensed that promise of modernity. Today, her building came less than a wound: “I went through the abandoned Harrods. Break his heart,” confesses the author about her last trip. That melancholy condenses the symbolic role of these spaces. More than a sales place, they were true urban milestones capable of defining the identity of a city.
And that identity is not played only on the scale of urban, also personally. What we choose to buy (and what we decide not) continues to function as a way of introducing ourselves to others. “We build our personality through our consumption tastes And what we don’t buy. It is a statement about who we are and who does not, ”says Cebrián. That dimension shows why business are scenarios where belongings, aspirations and collective memories are still modeled.
The rite and the screen
The history of consumption also has an aesthetic and cultural dimension. Going shopping was never just a procedure, because even at the weekend fairs the event is crossed by rituals, gestures and its own vocabulary. “Everyone has purchase memories -from the school uniform to the first adolescent disk -although we are aware of the excesses of consumerism. We have all gone shopping and we continue to go, in one way or another”, Marks the author.
But that tour, which seemed immutable, had a break in 2020. During the months of confinement, large shopping centers, clothing businesses and close stores remained closed. Consumption moved to digital land, with the rise of delivery platforms and online purchases. The collective experience of the walk was reduced to the screen: look, choose and pay from home.
The return to normal did not mean returning to the starting point. Since then, physical stores work more and more like showrooms, places where you are touched and tested that, many times, ends up buying online. But the face -to -face, far from extinguishing, retains its attraction because it offers order, abundance and sensory experience of shared space (points that virtuality lacks). And even digital culture can generate face -to -face rites: today young people make queues to access premises or viral products that circulate in social networks and become objects of desire.
The new luxury
Amid the digital avalanche, fairs and markets continue to defend their own place. “There you speak not only with who sells it, but with whom he made it, he chose wool, wove. It is a very small redoubt that claims the pleasure of going shopping,” says Cebrián. That experience, almost handmade, contrasts with industrial production and recovers the human side of consumption.
At the same time, it composes what could be considered “The new luxury” in the universe of consumption: experience. “The luxury is that whoever sells the meat does the cut and explain it to me, much more than to buy it packaged, for a longer time that saves me,” the specialist reasons. As in Spain, when an Iberian ham cutter (a profession in itself) prepares the live piece. That gesture, apparently everyday, today becomes a privilege. Faced with the homogeneity of online purchase, the uniqueness of human treatment acquires unexpected value.
At the same time, businesses are shelters. They are at that time when we have to “make time”, and then we cover ourselves in the air conditioning on heat days and heating those of cold, or rain. Because we are possible customers in any place. “You can enter, look and touch. And you can’t do that at home you don’t know, right?” The author smiles.
Two styles
For decades, the act of shopping was associated with women. For many, at a time when domestic life confined them to the home, going out to choose products was a break and, at the same time, the responsibility of deciding what and how much it was bought, always under the eyes of their husbands. That routine molded the idea that they were naturally more prone to consumption.
Cebrián also rescues how visual culture reinforced that image: The representations of women loaded with store bags, walking with an elegant stepThey were installing a female archetype linked to purchase as leisure and distinction. Faced with that, men appeared many times in the role of resigned companions, boring or directly angry while their partners toured stained glass. An image that still circulates.
But that division begins to crack. Sports consumption, electronics or even the universe of the shoes created spaces in which they They also play their role as experts and collectors. Although these exceptions do not erase the symbolic load: shopping is still more naturalized for women, while men still think about “out of place” if it is not in those niches.
Anyway, the initiative is applauded. Because in times when more and more businesses close (“this is a book that delays, when published they will have closed forever some of the stores it mentions,” warns the author), buying becomes almost a gesture of resistance. Much more than an act of exchange, it is a way of being present in the world.
Image gallery
