12 - 18 April 2001
Issue No.529
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 April 2001 Issue No.529 |
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Re-dressing the widows
The High Street. No apologies for the capitals. Everyone's high street is, after all, their High Street. And mine, by virtue of the location of the Weekly offices Downtown, my flat in Garden City, and the necessity, following tedious and long-lasting back problems, of walking for at least an hour per day, has become Talaat Harb. Talaat Harb, in the spring.
And in the spring Talaat Harb is a riot, what with the clearing away of winter stocks and the arrival of the new spring fashions. All those dowdy woolen and acrylic mixes have at last been cast out of windows, been ignominiously consigned to some dreary, anonymous and hopefully dank broom cupboard where with any luck they will be eaten by moths or else slowly moulder. They have been replaced by the finest, the most delicately spun natural and synthetic fibres, by cotton, rayons and nylon -- no shame here, for there is no shame in the easycare -- all proclaiming the new colours, and as loudly as possible (though this isn't actually that loud, given this season's seeming proclivity, on the High Street at least, to promote pastel).
And so it has arrived, as it has arrived for as long as anyone cares to remember, the sudden riot of colour that signals an end to the dog days of winter. Without pushing the urban pastoral to untenable extremes, without exhausting the conceit, it is surely possible to speak of patches of primrose, of banks of lavender, of the wonderful rose pinks that have bloomed behind the glass windows. Less a host of golden daffodils than a myriad of sheer, semi-transparent yellow nylon blouses, if anything blousier than last year, and not necessarily quite the thing one would choose to be seen in, but interesting, nonetheless, to view from behind the protective screen of the vitrine. Dangerous to touch, perhaps, but quite as fascinating, in their way, as anything to be found in a tank in the zoo. And what is more, these things don't move, let alone bite.
It is a spectator sport, this window shopping. And it is a far from solitary activity. It is unlikely that you will be wandering lonely down this particular High Street. Packed, the pavements will be almost impassable if you select the right hour, and everyone will be gazing, with various degrees of rapture or its absence, through the glass.
The new dressing, of the windows that is, is at least as exciting as the new dresses. A first glance, and it may all appear arbitrary, perfectly natural, this cramming full of a shallow, artificially illuminated space with so much. That, though, is the nature of the truly artful -- to disguise beneath a show of no apparent effort the effort, the sheer dexterity, that must indeed go into the display of quite so many wares.
Do not, though, be frightened. There is a point in your traversing of the High Street and it occurs sometime between the fourth and eighth journey, when strange things suddenly leap into view. The most obvious thing to be noticed, of course, will be the surprising juxtapositions of colour. This year, on the High Street at least, pale pistachio appears destined to be the navy blue of Egypt, so every window will boast several items in this shade. What will change over the course of your journeys is that slowly but surely each window specialising in clothes will arrange other shades around the pale pistachio in exactly the same way. Pastel violets will always stand some way behind pistachio, pale blues will be foregrounded. This is a slow process, and one that requires a degree of fine tuning on the part of the window dressers, but eventually each window will boost precisely the same tonal values as the next.
If you are a seasoned stroller the strange juxtaposition of garments -- the way in which really quite lurid items of underclothing inevitably creep through the children's section of the window -- will come as no surprise. Nor, indeed, are the lurid items in question particularly volatile -- they have been so succinctly whittled down to their bare essentials, some of which are then removed, to ever lend themselves successfully to redesign. The underwear amid the kids' clothing is a perennial thing, and is not given to the vagaries of season.
Eventually, too, you will come to recognise certain consistencies in the manner of display, in the gimmicks selected to dress up the window dressing. Several seasons ago one shop had the somewhat alarming idea of using skinned foxes, whose jaws would be clamped onto the hems of dresses, tails trailed across the floor of the window space so it looked for all the world as if the wearer of that season's fashions would be especially prone to attack from a pack of rabid animals, lending a sinister twist to the term fashion victim. And lo, in a matter of days, the foxes had spread, as packs appeared in several shop windows, exclusively attacking female models, generally by gnawing at the hems of their dresses. (Taxidermy is no longer de rigeur downtown, but in the suburbs, where fashion changes a little more sedately, the stuffed animal can still be found. A colleague informs me that in Roxy stuffed monkeys can even now be sighted, wearing sunglasses).
But the highlight for me has always been the changing of the shoe shop displays. Several years ago, with a colleague, and on the pages of this same newspaper, we attempted an exhaustive taxonomy of that season's shoes. It proved an enjoyable, if almost impossible, task. This season, though, it was heartening to see some favourite categories returning, not least the futurist, retro sci-fi model, with floral trimmings. A transparent heel, filled with liquid, in which float metallic flowers. A veritable cornucopia of the same, with the addition of fruit, tacked onto the clear plastic bridge of a sandal.
For years shoes appeared to be on a downward slide, the exuberant experimentation of the past having fallen prey to a newly discovered conservatism. Now, though, the world looks a little better, a tad less grey. Spring is here. And it's on a High Street near you.
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