Higher purchase
Ask anyone in the business of retail fashion how they’re finding trade, and the expletives will flow. Particularly from those invested in brick-and-mortar shops — the once-calculable space of the sell in which all fashion and fixtures channelled desire into a till that ka-chinged merrily to the capture of money.
That was back in the late 20th century, when transactions were linear, led by the brand and typically boxed with all the BS of life-defining benefits. These were the sort that American artist Barbara Kruger (a former magazine designer for Condé Nast) summed up in her semiotic one-liner in 1987: “I shop therefore I am.”
Hers was a dissing of Descartes’s 17th-century drill-down to
