In 2004, Mean Girls’ Regina George shouted, ‘get in loser, we’re going shopping!’ out the window of her silver convertible, succinctly summing up the experience of a generation.
This was also the year of the final season of Sex and The City (SATC), a show that had popularised the image of female friendships existing only in conjunction with armfuls of loot from Manolo Blahnik and Gucci. Earlier, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air‘s Hilary Banks and Clueless‘ Cher Horowitz had both made their entrance onto our screens weighed down with shopping bags.
The pop culture that surrounded my generation during our childhood depicted shopping as the go-to pastime for beautiful, successful and powerful women. This was neoliberal feminism at its finest, and we bought it.
In our early teens, even with just a single five-pound note in our purses, the high street was the top after school hang-out for my friends and me. True, going out to try on clothes gave us a break from our families and a glimpse of independence – but when we finally gained that independence, not much really changed.
Today, more often than not, the prospect of a spare hour either alone or with others is still met with the suggestion of looking round the shops.
Shopping for fun has become the norm.
But the shows and films we learned this habit from were double-edged. Beautiful and powerful these women may have been, but the beauty often came at the expense of their brains, and the power from someone else’s bank account.
Cher’s climactic moment of realisation in Clueless is interrupted when she walks past a shop window and thinks, ‘Ooh, I wonder if they have that in my size’; Hilary’s first line in Fresh Prince is ‘Dad, I need $300.’
Commercial culture in the 90s and 00s capitalised on teaching women that enjoying shopping was a central component of our womanhood, and then mocked us as stupid and gold-digging for actually doing it.
More recent releases still play off this trope, distinguishing between women who take shopping seriously – like Cher and Hilary – and women who only do it for a laugh. Wonder Woman depicted Etta, who was enlisted as the title character’s personal shopper, as fussy and ridiculous as she tried to help a bemused Diana (Gal Gadot) navigate the world of womenswear.
This example highlights perfectly how the ideal type of woman – Wonder Woman in this case – is one who engages in conventional women’s pastimes while acknowledging their absurdity.
We need more women on our screens spending their free time together and alone watching films, eating food, going for walks, playing games, reading books, creating things, looking at art and listening to music.
But the expectation that we’ll spend our time and money happily contributing to our own belittlement is just one of the reasons that the characterisation of shopping as a women’s hobby needs to change.
Other implications of gendered shopping offered a far more sinister impact. In order for shopping to become habitual, it needed to be affordable – not everyone has the resources of SATC protagonist Carrie Bradshaw or Regina, after all. The rise of cheap fast fashion was simultaneous with the chick flicks that taught us shopping was fun, and the combination has had destructive consequences.
Workers in garment factories overseas – the vast majority of which are women – regularly experience physical and verbal abuse, poor health and safety conditions, and wages so low that they can’t afford basic necessities. Sadly, most of that has been common knowledge for years. What’s new is the criticism drawing attention to fast fashion’s environmental impact.
Clothing is responsible for more annual carbon emissions than international flights and maritime shopping combined, according to a report by Business Insider, released this year – and the 85 per cent of textiles that go into landfill every year are enough to fill Sydney Harbour.
At present, attempts to combat these problems are directed towards creating an ethical consumerism – we’re encouraged to buy locally, to buy second hand, or to buy from co-operatives. These movements are, of course, beneficial, but they continue to legitimise the underlying assumption that enables consumerist habits: that buying things is good – and now wholesome – fun.
In truth, the economic divisions and environmental destruction that result from consumerism won’t change until the central space shopping has claimed for itself in our gendered social fabric is recovered. That recovery begins with broadening pop culture depictions of female friendships.
We need more women on our screens spending their free time together and alone watching films, eating food, going for walks, playing games, reading books, creating things, looking at art and listening to music – put simply, doing all the things that women in reality already do.
Portrayed well, any of these pastimes can become markers of success and beauty, and any can become a primary facilitator of female friendships: effectively, any can be attributed the power that shopping currently holds. And that power is what we need to harness change. Get in loser. We’re saving the world.
MORE: Why I’m mugging off Love Island’s fast fashion
MORE: Fast fashion is so entrenched we’re shocked when a royal rewears a dress
MORE: Slow fashion: How changing the way we buy clothes could save the planet
source https://metro.co.uk/2020/01/29/shopping-has-been-sold-to-us-as-the-only-hobby-for-women-and-its-time-we-took-a-stand-12069543/
0 Comments