Visualizing Emptiness

ABSTRACT

How can one create more by showing less? That is the central question in this article. Through a visual approach, we will look at emptiness as a generator of standing, exclusiveness, luxury sign value. One of the guiding cultural mechanisms of creating exclusiveness is the use of horror vacui, the fear of the empty. Using both psychological theory and civilization theory, the article connects the concept of emptiness and horror vacui to the creation of exclusiveness, of luxury. This theoretical argumentation is then confronted with a visual research on the use of emptiness in show windows. It shows that luxury boutiques or shops selling predominantly luxury products use emptiness in their shop windows in order to create a luxurious and exclusive atmosphere.

Notes

Besides the philosophical debates on the principle of horror vacui, several physicists (e.g., Pascal) tried to prove experimentally the existence of a void.

Elias treats the state formation in the transition from medieval feudalism to the nation states in the Renaissance.

In his Distinction, Bourdieu [1994] gives several examples of differences in aesthetic taste as well as how differences in uses and habits differ on several courts. He illustrates the working of the amor vacui principle in several domains.

The data collection was done in June 1999 by the author and a colleague on the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at Antwerp University. The author wants to thank Sofie Damen for her help in the data collection of the research. Both the coding and the analysis were done by the author himself.

If a limiting decision needed to be made, the encoder always took the left side of the entrance door. This additional rule was imposed to prevent a content-based decision (e.g., taking only empty windows). The left-criterion followed the reasoning that large stores have their entrance in the middle of the shop. In this fashion, the shop design itself usually suggested which part of the shop window needed to be inventoried.

One Euro equals 40.3399 Belgian Francs (1.32 U.S. in 2004).

In order to reduce bias, it is recommended [Suchar 1997] to use phrases from text as codes (in vivo coding). Since we worked with visual material it was not possible to code this way.

Atlas-ti provides a separate tool for organizing the open coding: the Network Editor. This tool allows the researcher to link and unlink different codes in a graphic network.

All clothes in the shop window were inventoried, independently of the presence of a price-tag. If three trousers were piled with only one price-tag, for example, the encoders were instructed to write down three separate trousers with this price. If no price-tags were shown, they were instructed to inventory the clothes in the shop window.

In this case, power refers strongly to monetary power, to the capacity to buy.

Of course, the reliability of this connection lies in the fact that we suppose that shops from Boss or Chanel are exclusive ones.

Only at the very beginning of the curve is there a little leap. The first two shops (called Jeffry and Boxer) at the very beginning of the curve have extremely low clothing prices. Both shops are located in the shopping street Abdijstraat, which is in a poorer district of Antwerp.

The main purpose of giving scores was to create an easily readable graph. Therefore, the scores for bulk sales shops and large chain stores were low (1 and 1.5) while the scores for the three types of boutiques were high (4, 4.5, and 5). The dotted line in the middle of the graph was also added manually for readability.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dimitri Mortelmans

DIMITRI MORTELMANS is a sociologist at Antwerp University, Belgium. He wrote his Ph.D. on the visualization of luxury based on a sociosemiotic analysis of print advertisements. His current research focuses on gift-giving, shopping behavior and youth, and work-life balance strategies in young families. He teaches qualitative and quantitative research methods. E-mail: [email protected]