Coming hot and sizzling off the griddle of the pandemic that truly isn’t over but fuck it we ball, I believe I speak for all of us when I say that it’s been a minute since the real world has felt real. Semi-recently, it’s gotten better, but for a while there we had nothing to do except sit, think, cry, and have our psyches downloaded into algorithms via double-tapped transactions devoid of worth and meaning. Oh, and shop online. Or waste an hour adding to cart, then checking the price, scoffing, and closing the tab, only to be beaten about the head and shoulders by personalized advertisements to remind us that we’re bad little consumers, look at all our shiny things, see how you abandoned them, imagine how sad they are sitting coldly on warehouse shelves, rotting rancidly in landfills.
Sometimes, its nicer to daydream about having something rather than actually acquiring it. When you finally get the thing, the romance of it becomes obsolete, and the mental Pinterest board is cast aside in favor of fantasizing about the next thing. It’s a bummer, but it’s just how we work. In our post-capitalist hellscape, consumption is king, and we are its loyal subjects no matter how much theory we read. London as we know it, like many cities, is borne from the Industrial Revolution. Long ago, mass manufacturing took a steaming shit upon England’s mostly agrarian economy, and the population boomed as people flocked here to find work. Over the subsequent centuries, London got equally as icky as it did rich and the Crown learned a cool new thing where if you sail somewhere and kill enough people, they let you do whatever you want. Thus, the factories that once defined the city’s smoggy skyline were torn down and moved to produce and pollute elsewhere, where the kiddos of color are poor and property tax is cheap. So, London is built for the mass consumption and acquisition of capital, but you can’t take it all home with you. High streets and shopping districts here have perfected the art of face appeal. Corporations bedeck their visage in such a way that you stare into them for at least two seconds longer than you would have otherwise, thinking not about the half a cent the sweatshop worker was paid for making the garment on display and instead of how sick you’d look strutting down the boulevard in it. London’s arcades were designed for this very purpose. Arcades, first popularized in the late 19th century, are very much not video gaming venues but enclosed high-end shopping centers, typically with one central lane and vaulted glass ceilings. They were constructed for easy shopping and entertainment for the higher classes, a reprieve from London’s distinctive temperamental weather. Walking through one of these arcades near the luxury shopping district of Bond Street, I encountered a store that sold almost exclusively art books, save for the Warhol-inspired (ripped, rather) pop-pastel Campbell’s soup cans containing candles, all which, arranged and spaced evenly apart, made up the meager window display. As I peered inside, I began thinking about who or what art books are for. An artist might scour a secondhand book store or stall in a market for something to pore over, for art they need, for art to glean inspiration or feeling from so that they can make something meaningful. In this gleaming arcade, separate from all around it as though intended to be inaccessible, existed an art bookstore so expensive it felt cheap. The back wall was lined with art books with overly aesthetically pleasing covers – glossy block print, contrasting colors, you know the type – each begging to collect dust on avant garde streamlined mid century-inspired asymmetrical mumble-mumble-Pottery Barn-mumble coffee tables Londonwide. It was an art bookstore empty of art. A couple of doors down, though, there was a pretty sick vintage watch store with a window display that of course involved royal blue velvet and the omission of those pesky price tags. Window displays are a psychological trick. They’re products, mass-produced and pointless, arranged in a mass of color and space that make fantastic spectacles out of nothing, suggesting meaning and tickling that part of the brain capitalism hammered into all of us long ago, that possessing these items would make the masses feel in any way fulfilled. Teams are hired to carefully curate these displays, to utilize the researched emotional effect of certain lighting colors on the brain and whatnot. People get degrees in this shit. Markets at least feel more authentic in this way; all vendors get is a folding table or two, so there’s less room for frills. What you see is what you get. London’s markets feel like echoes. My first day here, a big group of us went to Brick Lane. I was terribly sleep deprived and delirious, and navigating Brick Lane on a Sunday afternoon is not for the faint of heart, but it was easy to ignore that in favor of the grit of the street, the art, the intimidatingly cool and well-dressed people, and rows upon rows of stalls. If you’re anything like me, you are actively afraid of making small talk with strangers. The thing I’ve come to love about Londoners, especially people who work at markets, is that if you greet them with a nod and avoid eye contact afterwards, they will not engage you in conversation. I tried on dozens of rings, thumbed through records, stroked the shearling collars on 70s suede coats, contemplated Y2K Miu Miu kitten heels and vintage Harris Tweed suit jackets, all without having to brave the primal horrors of human interaction (the one time I was approached, it was indeed by an American vendor). As I did this, a certain individual I was with commented on my tendency to window shop, and at first I was like, “mind your business, dude,” but then as I pondered it I realized it wasn’t meant to be a dig. I know I like a good fulfilling meander, and in the vintage street market version of window shopping, there are no contrived-artful glass barriers; it invites tactile interaction with thoughtfully curated and, at least in Brick Lane’s case, woefully overpriced secondhand clothing and jewelry, and if you are braver than me, you can talk to the vendors and learn more about the histories of each piece and come to understand London’s fashion culture as a whole. I’ve witnessed the passion these people bear firsthand thanks to the interviewing prowess of one Georgia Bobo: they’ve got a story for every item they have hanging on their racks and are, more often than not, incredibly excited to share them. So really, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of browsing, but there is the issue of gratitude. Window shopping, even though it by virtue doesn’t involve spending money, is still an act of greed. Instead of sitting with what you already have, you’re coveting what you don’t. It’s easy to walk away feeling unsatisfied, lacking fundamentally in some way, like you’ve done something wrong by spending time and not money at a store. In a western culture such as ours that thrives on overconsumption of goods and commodification of the people responsible for making them, we are made to forget what being content feels like when it isn’t accompanied with the rush of dopamine that purchasing something we really wanted activates in our glorified monkey brains. Every Monday from 5 A.M. to 5 P.M., Covent Garden holds a bric-a-brac antiques market with piles and piles of tarnished jewelry, twine-bound bundles of long-forgotten love letters, toy cars, vintage Wedgwood trinket dishes, first-edition leather bound books, 1920s French needlepoint evening purses, cigarette-yellowed petticoats and flapper dresses, and much more for sale. There are a million pretty things to look at and touch, and each seller is more eccentric than the last, and they always have a thoughtful answer to your questions. This also rings true for many other markets in London, such as Portobello Road, Camden, and Alfies, each as quirky as the other. While these goods still aren’t things we humans need to survive, the care and intent that goes into the curation of each table accompanied with the charm and historical-cultural significance of a well-made and -loved antique item makes markets like these a shopping experience that doesn’t render me sideswiped by guilt. I treat these markets like a museum, the vendors the curators/artists and the art something I can actually hold with my grubby little consumerist hands. While leaving a store without a shopping bag and a receipt might feel like betraying God, what with the overly friendly greeters that make your empty-handed presence known as you attempt to slip out unnoticed, it is far more common and socially acceptable to come to a market just to wander around and look. To be fair, the same goes for traditional window shopping, but a posed minimalist window display with a single £8,000 luxury handbag hung aslant from the ceiling on a clear nylon thread resonates like deceit, or stupidity, or just a meaningless void-vacuum thought spiral of why the fuck is the world like this I hate it here. At least London’s markets retain something that feels like humility.
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