One of the most frequently asked questions nowadays is what will happen to shopping in a post-Covid world. Many non-essential shops are indeed still closed in towns, regions and countries where there is a lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic, and we have now got accustomed to buying what we need on the Internet, without touching or seeing the goods in a store or in a window shop.
Window shops and displays generate desire, but we are keeping ourselves satisfied without looking at any of them: when physical shoping halted we turned to browsing screens to escape our collective emotional emptiness (something that fills our houses with parcels and, often, with unwanted goods bought on a tantrum). In three weeks' time it will be Easter, but the window shops of some stores in our towns were frozen with Winter sales slogans and sale stickers or with Carnival costumes gathering dust, a scenario that makes you think about The Day of the Triffids, with silence outside, and life in a suspended state.
Retail has radically changed and it is clear that many shops and department stores have gone down with the pandemic and will not reopen, deepening the crisis we are already living in. At the end of our lockdowns, will we be attracted en masse by shops or will we just be flâneurs strolling around the shopping districts and taking in the sights and sounds without a purpose and without necessarily buying anything? It is difficult to say, but maybe there are suggestions to follow for shop owners to attract consumers. Architect and designer Lina Bo Bardi wrote about window displays in an essay published on the magazine Habitat in 1951.
"Window displays are an immediate reflection, a quickfire snapshot of a city's personality, and not just of its outward traits, but its deepest character," Bo Bardi wrote in the article. "As the 'medium' through which products are sold, the window display is entirely in thrall to money: it is the velvet glove whose indifferent, decorative appearance conceals the knotty talons of calculations of 'costs', 'margins' and 'profit' – columns of cold sums (…) it is a little mouse-trap primed with bait to entice the mouse-like consumer – 'fire sale!', 'final clearance!' – all flagged with posters, slogans, arrows. Window displays shout: 'We want to sell, sell, sell, because we want your money, MONEY.' The garlands of flowers, the glazed vases, the smiling mannequins, the velvet drapery – they all scream the same word, giving away the modus operandi of the window-dresser, the way the 'decoration' is focused solely on luring the consumer-mouse."
According to Bo Bardi, window displays have moral responsibility as they help shape the taste of city-dwellers and the face of a city and reveal something of its essence. Besides, "a city's displays can undo years of efforts to correct and guide public taste."
In her essay Bo Bardi focused on diplays aimed at the middle classes and at the newly rich and juxtaposed them to the working-class neighbourhoods with window shops spontaneously arranged. These window displays look more genuine, according to the architect, they represent a pure atmosphere and not a strict and cold exercise, they embody the honest qualities of the display and they are not a mouse-trap.
So, who knows, maybe these are the sort of displays people may want to see in shops at the end of the pandemic - basic, simple and straight to the point rather than in your face and luring consumers with bold slogans and complex concepts, in a way they could help bring back some order also in our cluttered minds and ease the stress of our fatigued eyes as well, bombarded on a daily basis by offers in messages randomly found in our email boxes or in bright pop-ups insistently opening on our screens as we browse the Internet, tricking us into buying things we may not need or may not even want.
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