LONDON, 3 January 2003 — It is the January sales, in Britain anyway, and a time when the strange female love affair with shopping is shown in stark relief. With Christmas now gone, British women are choosing to brave crowds and freezing winter temperatures in the pursuit of items they probably don’t need and very likely can’t afford — and not out of necessity, but for fun.
Recent research by Elle magazine found that 55 percent of women in Asian countries preferred shopping to relaxation or spending time with their partner. For many women, retail therapy, pure and simple, is how they get their kicks.
But why do women love shopping so much? And perhaps more importantly, why do men apparently not? When it comes to shopping, the sexes are worlds apart. Men tend to view shopping as a chore, a necessary way of obtaining things they need; for women, it is a leisure activity and a reward.
Certainly, it is clear that in a consumer society, shopping has come to stand for much more than just buying things. It is your ticket to an idealized self. Charles Revson, who founded Revlon in 1932, figured this out long ago, saying, “In the factory we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope.” But it is in recent years that the culture of shopping has become increasingly about image rather than substance.
Dr. Helga Dittmar, social psychologist at Sussex University, England, points out how dramatically advertising has changed in the past few decades. “If you look at advertising in the 1950s, it’s much more about the product and what it does: A soap that cleans well, for example. Now advertising is all about young attractive people doing something aspirational. Shopping has moved far away from the traditional rational consumer model. It’s not about obtaining goods for our needs, but about buying identities.”
If it is women who have been most seduced by this, it may be because shopping is associated with an evolutionary instinct to nurture and provide for the family that has traditionally been a female role. The emotional and psychological benefits that the shopping experience promises center on improving one’s personal appearance, and a gossipy bonding experience for friends — notions which, all the evidence would suggest, are more important to women than they are to men. The realm of feel-good shopping is now spreading even to domestic spheres. The rise of the domestic icons, from British celebrity chef Nigella Lawson to the more recent emergence of housework gurus (from How Clean Is Your House to Vogue’s Rita Konig), has elevated previously mundane consumer items to must-have status. Quirky cookie-cutters and pretty ironing board covers are becoming as much a lifestyle statement as Gucci handbags. They are accessories for the life we want to lead, not the life we really lead.
Shopping, bluntly, combines female comradeship with the opportunity to make oneself more attractive to men. It is the sweet, acceptable, feminine face of a materialistic world. It allows us escapism — the kid-in-a-sweet-shop elation of a blow-out spree — and a nibble of an aspirational lifestyle. The lifestyle of the female urban sophisticate, as idealized in “Sex and the City”, revolves around a fetishistic obsession with Jimmy Choos and being on first-name terms with the manager of Prada. This lifestyle has become common currency among advertisers: Even the latest adverts for store-next-door Marks & Spencer (UK high street retailer) feature expensively clad women sipping expensive coffees, surrounded by shopping bags. It’s not just about what we buy, but they way that we buy it. Aside from the moment when you hand over your card and sign, the experience of sales shopping in a boutique or department store could scarcely be more different from that of the weekly supermarket shop. In a supermarket, racing-track straight lines and bright lighting encourage a brisk, no-loitering attitude; in a boutique, layout is designed to encourage meandering, and to accommodate groups of two or three browsing together.
The importance, for the retailer, of creating the right shopping “experience” is reflected in the success of the Net-a-Porter online fashion boutique. Net-a-Porter has succeeded where many other shopping websites have failed, because it goes to great lengths to recreate the shopping “rush”. The site is designed to echo a glossy magazine, and purchases arrive the same day, beautifully wrapped in tissue paper inside a stiff, ribbon-tied bag. “Our philosophy is to exceed expectations,” says owner and founder Natalie Massanet. “Because women love shopping, we had to make it better. It’s a VIP service that is offered to everyone who loves fashion.”
In part, the rise of shopping is simple economics. Disposable income has risen in recent decades. “What’s more, with credit cards and store cards now widely available, you can spend money you don’t have, which you couldn’t do 20 years ago,” says Dittmar. But clearly many women enjoy the shopping experience without getting into debt. Among teenage girls, going shopping is a favorite Saturday activity, often involving a meager haul of a sparkly hairclip or new nail polish. The hours devoted to shopping can be vastly out of proportion to the amount of cash actually spent. “The social element of shopping, and the part that involves having fantasies — how would I look in this dress — is still there, for women, even if you don’t buy anything,” says Dittmar.
In “The Second Sex”, Simone de Beauvoir called shopping “a profound pleasure, a discovery, almost an invention”. Shopping enables women to enjoy the position of strength won by economic independence: As potential consumers, they have the power to give or withhold their money, to be flattered and courted by simpering shop assistants. But there is also truth in the view of Germaine Greer, who famously called shopping “a festival of the female oppressed”.
