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The Art of Shopping
Posted Colin Byrne on November 4th, 2008 | Filed under Personal, Public Relations
Nice weekend in Boston, the tail end of the leaf season. Some modern art and modern shopping – for my teen daughter not me.
First the art and an exhibition, at the new harbour-side home of the Boston ICA, of surreal sculptures and scape’s by Tara Donovan (www.icaboston.org). She uses everyday materials like (lots of) buttons, paper plates and plastic cups and turns them into beautiful topographies and coral-like structures. One sea/moon/ice-scape is incredibly constructed of 800,000 white plastic cups. Worth seeing if you get the chance, as is the view from the ICA of the entire sweep of Boston harbour and bay.
Then the shopping. My daughter’s fave shop is Abercrombie & Kent. With its mooseheads on the wall and pics of well-scrubbed, healthy and half dressed all-American teens, chunky sweaters, colourful hooded tops and plaid shirts, it reminds me of when GAP first came into our lives. This draws a snort from my daughter. No-one, she assures me, shops at GAP (i.e. not her generation).
Top sellers at the moment seem to be ripped – or “destroyed” – jeans. As I sit there listening to dance mixes of Abba’s “SOS” and Spandau Ballet’s “Gold”, while she tries on artfully ripped denim, I reflect that teen culture takes and re-purposes stuff from the past, and that’s a good thing. For us old(er) folk, the fact that our young employees and kids and their friends are wearing and listening to versions of stuff we did is a reaffirmation that we are not quite yet one foot in the popular culture grave.
When I tell her that we wore ripped jeans in the 80’s (though we did the ripping ourselves on the whole) and guys like George Micheal strutted their stuff in them, she looks bemused. Less at the thought of this fashion being around a decade before she was born, more that she had never heard of George Micheal.
PS I mentioned in an earlier post that I was reading the new book Born Digital. Those of us in PR and marketing are very focused on our new recruits and and young talent in their twenties. The first generation of digital natives. But the digital world is not frozen in time, it will continue to evolve. My 13 year old daughter tells me her and her friends send an average of 200 text messages a day! The second generation of DNs are on the march!
November 5th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Your post made me laugh, because I can completely relate! I remember when I was a teen shopping for bell bottoms with my dad. He commented on the price and then said he could make me a pair as he used to sew and bleach his own bell bottoms. Poor guy, I couldn’t stop laughing
Thank you as well for the book recommendation! I’ll have to check it out
December 30th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Ooops! You mention your daughther’s favourite shop is Abercrombie & Kent. She would be surprised. Abercrombie & Kent is the specialist travel agency – Abercrombie & Fitch is the clothing store making authentic quality gear for over 100 years. Classic Dad mistake!
Charlie
Henry Herbert Tailors
http://www.henryherbert.com