Saturday, first day of sales, outdoor center. Groups of girls and women of all ages flock in line in front of the shops. The first queues are formed, some complain of the heat, others of the fact that "There are those who arrive and want to jump up the queue, think about it". A few males, mostly tired air, distractedly watch the showcases. Within a radius of one kilometre, the six-monthly collective ritual of the balance is consumed.
I'm reminded of an article by Miriam some time ago (which - through a lucid analysis - pointed out theoretical and substantial differences between slow fashion and fast-fashion), and I stop to reflect on the role that the fashion system assigns to women from an early age. In a three-storey shop of children's clothes almost two floors are occupied by female garments. In the showcase, only a small portion of the space is reserved for men. A few meters ahead, a well-known chain: the situation does not change.
That both the demand to determine the market and that therefore, in the face of a more frequent availability to shopping, are the shops for girls and ladies those most common in our cities would seem a simple market fact. However, it is always a fact that even males are dressed, that they pay attention to fashion and buy cosmetics products: why then do they seem to be less "sensitive" to the call of sales? Why can hardly we see them spending whole afternoons in shopping sessions with friends?
Without wanting to give easy answers to an extremely multi-faceted and changing question, a hypothesis could be directly linked to the "sentimental education" - pass me the constraint - of girls. If during childhood it is still possible to find smaller differences between males and females in terms of input at the time of purchase (whether it's a new doll, a car, a Lego box, each child* does "whims" to get a new toy), and despite the fact that it is already evident that more attention is being paid to the "care" of the feminine aspect, there is a growing number of "social" proposals and responses for girls are increasingly developing in relation to consumption.
Regardless of the daily activities (sport, music, voluntary work), girls' leisure time begins to intersect with the shopping world at an early stage. Looking at the city centre on any Saturday afternoon, it will be easy to see a greater number of girls looking at the showcases and "bathtub". The guys wanting to challenge each other in a soccer game or, even in the centre, but - in most cases - mainly to observe the peers.
Journals for teenagers put a lot of emphasis on the fashion/consumer element, with content specially designed to feed the equation "free time = shopping". Even the responses to moments of discomfort are growing more and more tied to a consumerist approach that is not reasoned and little attentive to real needs. How many times have you ever heard a disappointed or sad guy say,"Give... we're going to do a little shopping so do you shoot up the moral"? Yet it is the answer to the most common "discomfort" among girls and, at the same time, the most culturally widespread proposal of sociality.
The training course and the social context in which girls and girls are early introduced therefore strongly influences the choices "irreflexed" of adulthood, as well as during the years of training we build the comfort zones that will support us, without needing to think about it, once grown up. This way of "feeling" the gesture of purchasing, before even thinking about it, prevents, in many cases, an adult approach to conscious and responsible spending, experienced by women as a limitation, rather than as an exercise of "purchasing power" from which derives, inevitably, a great responsibility.
But this is another story I will talk about next week.
