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Abstract
‘Leisure shopping’ is a particular kind of shopping activity that is devoted mainly to fashion clothes and accessories. Women are commonly represented as the main leisure shoppers, and consequently, they tend to be at the centre of shopping centres' mainstream discourses. This article argues that interpretations of representations of ‘leisure shopping’ and the corresponding practice have too often ignored the daily and seemingly ‘banal’ experiences of the social actors involved. The primary purpose of this article is to show how gender roles are performed and reified in high-end factory outlet villages in Italy. It adopts a cross-sectional approach to ‘leisure shopping’ that includes an analysis of the ‘languages’ of two Italian high-end factory outlet villages, the ‘social space’ represented by the same sites and the ‘stories’ about a few ideal-typical female shopping experiences. These aspects are situated in the Italian cultural and political context at the time the research was conducted. Very different demands – such as sensuality, efficiency and motherly care – are put on women in Italy, as well as in the majority of Western societies. The analysis reveals that through their practice of browsing in a high-end factory outlet village, women often reproduce stereotypes while simultaneously trying – though ambiguously – to challenge them.
La condición de ‘Cosmo-amas de casa’: ir de compras por placer, la corriente dominante y sus ambigüedades
La ‘compras por placer’ es un tipo particular de ir de compras que se dedica principalmente a la ropa y accesorios de moda. Las mujeres son comúnmente representadas como las principales compradoras por placer, y en consecuencia, suelen estar en el centro de los discursos dominantes de los centros comerciales. Este artículo propone que las interpretaciones de las representaciones del ‘comprar por placer’ y la correspondiente práctica han ignorado con demasiada frecuencia las experiencias cotidianas y aparentemente ‘banales’ de los actores sociales involucrados. El objetivo principal de este artículo es mostrar cómo los roles de género son performados y materializados en villages de compras outlet de las marcas de moda en Italia. Adopta un enfoque transversal al ‘comprar por placer’, que incluye un análisis de los ‘idiomas’ de dos villages de compras outlet italianos, el ‘espacio social’ representado por los mismos lugares y las ‘historias’ sobre algunas experiencias típicas de compras de las mujeres. Estos aspectos están situados en el contexto cultural y político italiano en el momento en el que la investigación se llevó a cabo. Se ponen muchas demandas diferentes – sensualidad, eficiencia y cuidado materno – sobre las mujeres italianas, así como en la mayoría de las sociedades occidentales. El análisis revela que a través de su práctica de recorrer en un village de compras outlet, las mujeres a menudo reproducen los estereotipos al tiempo que simultáneamente tratan – aunque en forma ambigua – de desafiarlos.
寰宇家庭主妇的境况：休閒消费、主流及其含糊之处
‘休閒消费’是专指流行服饰及饰品的特定消费活动。女性普遍被描绘成主要的休閒消费者，因而往往成为购物中心主流论述的核心焦点。本文主张，’休閒消费’再现的诠释与相应的实践，经常忽略其中的社会行动者日常且看来’平庸’的经验。本文的主要目的，便是展现意大利的高档货工厂畅货中心内，性别的角色如何展演并具体化。本文运用横断面研究取径（cross-sectional approach）来检视’休閒消费’，包含分析两座意大利高档货畅货中心的’用语’、相同 场所呈现的’社会空间’，以及数个理想的典型女性购物经验的’故事’。这些面向将置于本研究进行时意大利的文化与政治脉络中。相当不同的需求——诸如感官享受、效率以及如母亲般的——照料——被附加在意大利和大多数西方社会的女性身上。本分析揭露，女性藉由在高档货工厂 畅货中心浏览商品的行为，经常再生产了性别刻板印象，却也同时试图透过含糊的方式挑战这些刻板印象。
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the GPC editors and the two anonymous reviewers that provided very detailed comments on the first version of my manuscript. It is rare to have such constructive revisions. This article draws from my Ph.D. research, it was first conceived as a conference paper for the ISA Congress held in Gothenburg in 2010 while I was a visiting fellow in Finland. It was then submitted while I was a postdoc at the Politecnico of Milan the following year, and the revisions were made while I was a visiting postdoc fellow at IREST, in France. Thanks to Giampaolo Nuvolati (my Ph.D. supervisor at the Milan-Bicocca University); Keijo Rahkonen (Helsinki University); Corinna Morandi (Politecnico of Milan) and Maria Gravari Barbas (Paris I Panthéon – Sorbonne). I am also very grateful to Roberta Sassatelli (University of Milan) who has been a major source of information for me; she always answered my requests for suggestions or explanations. Last but not least, I would not have made it without Nora Mahony, the patient linguistic reviewer of this article.
Notes
1. The original design of high-end factory outlet centres (also called designer outlet centres or villages) derives from factory shops (Falk Citation2009; Fernie Citation1995; Timothy Citation2004). Since widespread outsourcing of production to developing economies, the format of factory shops has changed significantly. The initial tendency was to combine stores that offered a single high-quality or exclusive brand manufacturer's own products at reduced prices with stores selling discounted merchandise from a wider variety of manufacturers. Later, they began to offer recreational opportunities in a well-maintained and controlled open-air environment. Certain factory outlet centres developed ‘natural’ or ‘nostalgic’ themes along the lines of popular themed leisure parks. Finally, the centres began to be managed by specialized companies. In this construct, factory outlet centres abandoned their close connections to the factories and became an important part of both retail and tourism landscapes in their own right (Conroy Citation1998; Guy Citation1998; Rabbiosi Citation2011). Nevertheless, this kind of shopping centre continues to be categorized as a ‘factory outlet centre’ in most retail-related events in order to stress its specificity of selling discounted commodities.
2. Evidence of an ‘Anglo–American dominance’ was pointed out in the assessment of 15 Years of Gender, Place and Culture by Johnson (Citation2008).
3. Among the variety of information materials collected about Italian high-end factory outlet villages are the store directories of the two chosen shopping centres. They are the material support that is most available to visitors on site, distributed both at the information office and at many sites inside the ‘villages’ (along the walls, at boutique checkouts, etc.). In this article, reference is made to store directories collected on site during field trips in 2007 and 2008, over a period of approximately 18 months. All images and slogans described in the article were in use at the time the research was conducted but are no longer in use. At that time, Fidenza Village store directories varied more than those at Serravalle Designer Outlet. They generally focused on a chosen seasonal theme (‘Modern Nostalgia’, ‘Romantic Autumn’). Of the five different store directories collected, only the one described in this article showed a figure of a woman; the others displayed commodities. But these commodities were explicitly feminine items, such as high-heeled shoes, evening gowns, skirts, etc. During the same period, Serravalle Designer Outlet brochures always featured the same model, and nearly always in the same posture. Only the commodities changed according to the autumn/winter or spring/summer fashion season (from woollen to linen textiles). The same image was used for the three other high-end factory outlet villages managed by McArthurGlen in Italy at that time. The brochures of these other Italian ‘villages’ were available at the Serravalle Designer Outlet information office, as well as those for other McArthurGlen high-end factory outlet centres across Europe.
4. Fidenza Village – Value Retail refused grant permission for the reproduction of image 3. McArthurGlen did not respond to requests to reproduce images 1 and 2.
5. This store directory bears the logo of Designer Outlet Barberino, another factory outlet village managed by McArthurGlen in Italy. Nevertheless, it has been collected at the information point of Designer Outlet Serravalle, on spring 2007.
6. The societal demands described are addressed to women in Italy, as well as in the majority of Western societies. Nevertheless, the aim of this article was to offer an analysis situated in Italy at the time that the research was conducted, so no further generalization regarding other contexts was explicitly made.
7. Though the notion of cosmolinga (Cosmo-housewife) was formerly used by Poidimani (Citation2001, 142, 154, 157), I do not strictly defer to her etymological acceptance of the term. Poidimani uses this composite to show how women have ‘transferred’ their role as domestic carers to other scales and realms (the whole cosmos). According to this Italian contemporary feminist philosopher, women have turned the role of carer into a cage, instead of a tool for freedom, by trying to solve all of the global disasters caused by men (N. Poidimani, personal communication).
8. The magazine currently has 63 international editions, is printed in 32 languages and is distributed in more than 100 countries, Italy included. (Source: http://www.hearst.com/magazines/cosmopolitan.php, accessed 21 August 2011.) CosmoGirl, the teenage spin-off from Cosmopolitan, was published from 1999 until 2008. It was aimed at teenage girls and featured fashion and celebrities. Consequently, ‘Cosmo girl’ came to be used to label smart, single, young women with a penchant for fashion and an ambition for living the high life.
9. The notion of ‘social space’ used here follows Zukin (Citation2004) and Zukin and Maguire's (Citation2004) use of it, which is largely inspired by Pierre Bourdieu. By her own assumptions, her understanding of shopping is also influenced by Goffman and Foucault (Zukin 2004, 28).
10. This section is based on observations of shopping performances at Italian high-end factory outlet villages as well as on narrative feedback on shopping trips collected through semi-structured interviews. They were recorded and later transcribed and analysed. The interviews represented a sort of retrospective account of the interviewees' visits to Italian high-end factory outlet villages, and it proved very useful to have in-depth, personal accounts of shoppers' self-interpretations of their own practice at the same place. While no critical issues were encountered, a general difficulty in taking the topic of shopping ‘seriously’ was found. In fact, an earlier idea of organizing focus groups was abandoned after failing to assemble a group of strangers to discuss something considered to be ‘banal’, and therefore something that was not worth making the effort to discuss in a formal, institutionalized setting. Shopping, for most people, is not a ‘serious’ research topic, even though they commonly chat about their shopping experiences among their friends and acquaintances. With a less formal setting and allowing time for longer narratives, semi-structured interviews proved to be a good method. Nevertheless, the interviews varied considerably in length, from 30 min to an hour and a half, reflecting the aforementioned difficulty in reporting about shopping in more formal settings than those of a casual, friendly chat. On the whole, 36 interviews were collected, 24 of which were from female shoppers and 12 from male shoppers. The people interviewed did not live near to the high-end factory outlet villages observed; they came from urban contexts, were aged between 20 and 73 and belonged to a ‘vague’ middle class. A ‘snowball’ sampling followed an initial contact with both female and male potential interviewees. The larger number of female than male interviewees is a consequence the implications of which were taken into consideration in the analyses.
11. A recent comparative analysis about gender differences in time use over the life course in France, Italy, Sweden and the USA showed that a gender gap in childcare – with child-rearing generally in the charge of mothers – seems particularly strong in Italy (Anxo et al. Citation2011).
12. Names have been changed.
13. Then, Prime Minister Berlusconi chose a former TV showgirl as Minister for Equal Opportunities and habitually derided female MPs in the opposition for being unattractive.
14. Berlusconi often chose to be publicly accompanied by beautiful young women, sometimes under the age of 18, whom he allowed to call him ‘Daddy’, and organized parties where escorts were engaged as entertainment for him and his guests. One such relationship is at the centre of an ongoing trial in which more than one of Berlusconi staff members are suspected of aiding and abetting prostitution.
15. A kind of culture that places women in a subordinate role they can emerge from only if they accept to subjugate their intellectual qualities and autonomy to a hyper-aestheticization and hyper-eroticization of their appearance.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Chiara Rabbiosi
Chiara Rabbiosi was awarded a Ph.D. in Urban and Local European Studies at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy) in 2009. Her dissertation ‘New Itineraries of Consumption. Outlet Villages as an Interactive Stage’ focused on shopping as an interface between economic and cultural institutions, and on consumption as an arena where actors are engaged in transmuting different kinds of capital into symbolic capital. Chiara has been a junior postdoc fellow at the University of Helsinki (Finland), at the Politecnico of Milan (Italy), Politecnico of Milano (Italy), and at the Institut de Recherche et Etudes Supérieures du Tourisme, Université Paris 1 Panthéon – Sorbonne (France), with a ‘Research in Paris 2011’ grant. She is currently a junior postdoc fellow at the Alma Mater University of Bologna (Italy), School for Advanced Studies in Tourism Sciences.