Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 9 -15 November 2000 Issue No.507
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Daylight snobbery

By Nigel Ryan

The former British ambassador to Egypt used to give a necessarily pointed piece of advice to British companies seeking openings in the Egyptian market. It ran something like this: Forget, he advised, the fact that this is a country of more than 60 million; pitch, instead, to a much smaller number, to the few million inhabitants who have disposable incomes worth chasing.

A perfectly sound piece of commercial advice, and one that may well have something to do with the UK now being the largest non-Arab investor in Egypt. Yet the fact that this piece of advice is seldom, if ever, aired in public, should give some pause for thought.

The latest British high street name to appear in Egypt is Habitat -- the furniture store that, according to the advertisements that have been appearing for Arkadia, Cairo's newest and largest shopping mall that opened two weeks ago, is located somewhere in the seven storey shopping complex. According to the promotional brouhaha surrounding the opening, this new temple to consumerism is proof, too, of the efficacy of a decade of economic reform. Hey, the medicine may have been bitter, the message might be paraphrased, but look -- now you can buy the same sofa from the same shop that was a seventies trendsetter on the British high street before it ran into near terminal financial problems and design guru Terence Conran departed to move further upmarket.

Quite how a shopping complex that relies for much of its appeal on the fact that it stocks expensive ranges of imported goods stands as testimony to the healthy state of the local economy is anyone's guess. There is something more than a tad faulty about the logic, and it doesn't take much imagination to identify where the fault lines lie. Nor, for that matter, is it too difficult to understand the reluctance on any official level to acknowledge that the only significant levels of purchasing power are concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority.

Certainly -- and it takes only a modicum of observation to detect the trend -- there is a great deal of optimism in the growth potential at the luxury end of the retail market, for which read, an insatiable appetite for expensive imported goods. And it is an appetite to which any number of foreign retailers are perfectly willing to cater, selling highly priced geegaws to an even tinier section of society than that pinpointed by the British ambassador.

And now there are a plethora of magazines that clearly aspire to become the bible of that tiny section of society, glossy bits of aspiration that have been around for a while, and that for some reason arrive on my desk every month.

They are remarkable productions of sorts. They exist, one must suppose, as vehicles for advertising, clearly commercial ventures that service an advertising industry that has, by and large, outdistanced its media counterparts. Everyone now has an advertising budget, the only problem being that in a market that is devoid of research, and serviced by publications of no-fixed, or at least unaudited, circulation, no one really knows where to place their ads. The key to success, then, is to insist as loudly as possible that your publication actually reaches that A1 group, the only people who have any real purchasing power. And what better strategy than to cram as many of them onto your pages as possible. Hence the cringe makingly saccharine section, Scene and Heard, with which one magazine opens. Page after page of photographs of people attending each others engagements and weddings and luncheon parties, with captions that would make even Barbara Cartland blush. No post-nuclear irony need be imputed to the grooms who "glow" with happiness, or the brides in their "simple but elegant gowns" looking "radiant". There are "immaculate celebrations", decorated "with very refined taste". "The lavish party," the caption writer gushes, "was attended by the elite of Egyptian society, and a grand time was had by all." And there they all are, all the "distinguished number (sic) of guests who wished the charming couple all the happiness in the world," photographed glowing, being radiant in red, or just plain "gorgeous in a simple yet elegant gown," smiling at you from the glossy pages.

You can giggle all you like at the simpering captions, at the crudely self-satisfied, thoroughly unquestioning tone adopted throughout Egypt's modern lifestyle magazines, at the patently inept editorial insistence on "refined taste" given such an unrefined context, at the unreconstructed aspirational crassness of features such as Your Favourite Parisian Restaurants. ("My favourite is Le Grand Venise. I recommend all the dishes.") The magazines, though, are likely to welcome the joke as willingly as Arkadia will greet its next door neighbours, the inhabitants of Boulaq Abul-Ela who have yet to reap the benefits of economic reforms the success of which the mall itself is a testimony. They are closer to the other side of Mars than to even a hint of irony.

But just imagine a photo shoot: grainy, Horst-glamour photographs of beautiful women standing around the pavements of Cairo wearing the kind of evening dresses that carry five figure price tags. Head thrown back, perfect profile presented to camera, hair a little disheveled, perhaps, by the artificially created breeze, though not too disheveled, since there is a stylist on hand to prevent that. The hand embroidered silk organza is thrown into high relief by the backdrop -- dusty pavement, crumbling masonry, a litter bin, possibly, attached to a lamp post, but bottomless, creating an interesting pile of debris directly beneath. And on the facing page a sheath of black velvet, set off by the less uniform textures of informal housing, a perfect little black dress to see you through the cocktail hours. Or rising above a gaggle of street urchins a towering figure, impossibly thin, swathed in watermark taffeta the expensive sheen of which provides a needed counterpoint to the more ragged fabrics below, cleverly lit to cloak the faces of those beneath in shadow.

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