All the world’s a store
Emilia Petrarca on the theatrical highs and lows of shopping in the internet age
In 1981, The New Yorker’s fashion critic, Kennedy Fraser, published an essay titled “Electronic Shopping,” in which she predicted technology’s effect on the future of retail with uncanny accuracy. “The department stores that will survive into the future seem likely to be not necessarily those with the biggest or best choice of goods but those with the most ingenious displays, the most dramatic décor, and a way of convincing shoppers that they are places to see and be seen,” she wrote. “Although department stores must continue to make sales, that activity appears to be subsidiary to their broader social function as a form of theater, with the customers as the cast.”
I re-read this essay, along with several others compiled in Fraser’s seminal collection The Fashionable Mind, in preparation for a panel discussion I hosted on Monday with Substack on the “state of shopping” in 2025. Titled the Shop Rat Summit, after my shopping- and style-focused newsletter of the same name, its goal was to bring together my favorite writers and retailers and pose questions similar to those Fraser raised 40-something years ago. Will AI change the way we shop? How do affiliate links work? Are reSTOREraunts, or hybrid retail-restaurant spaces, the future? In a moment of such widespread industry change—new tariffs, creative directors, Vogue editors, oh my—I thought it would be nice to get together and talk it out.
The event took place in the middle of Printemps New York, a retail space that is explicitly “not a department store.” Instead, it’s something like a shopping Disneyland, where visitors are invited to browse, but also touch, smell, eat, and drink—have an experience, if you will. Whatever you want to call it, it is precisely the kind of modern destination Fraser envisioned. Re-reading “Electronic Shopping,” I was struck by how much both the space and the event resembled a form of theater. In my review of Printemps for the Cut, I likened the store to Shiz University from Wicked, and even subconsciously dressed like Elphaba on Monday in head-to-toe green.
Everyone needs a little drama, and Printemps offers plenty of it, visually speaking. However, the stronger parallel I felt between the store and the stage was being in the presence of real, live human beings feeling real, intense human emotions … about shopping. That may sound cheesy, but the human element of shopping is no longer a given; it is a luxury. Brands like J.Crew are using computer-generated images for their vintage-inspired catalogs, and algorithms and affiliate links have homogenized concepts like “personal style” and “good taste” to the point of meaninglessness. As a result, I believe, the social function of stores—and, by extension, shopping newsletters—is to remind us what it feels like to be organically obsessed with something and share that feeling with others.
“I mean, look around right now. I think we’re all seeking out that human connection,” said Kathleen Sorbara of Sorbara’s New York, a vintage store in Brooklyn, during one panel, titled “What Does a Modern Store Look Like?”
We were all there for the same reason: not just to talk about shopping, but to swap secrets and bond over our shared impulses and infatuations. As
pointed out, the shopping spree has always held cultural weight—on-screen, on the page, and in our own imaginations. Her “invitation-only” newsletter, Opulent Tips, captures that same charge. To tag along with her on whatever breathless shopping adventure she’s embarked upon is a thrill. Often, I feel the impulse to applaud when her email reaches its denouement.Theater is satisfying to watch because it is both scripted and alive. Every night is the same but also slightly different. Stores are like this too. You can expect to find what you need—T-shirts and jeans; suits and ties—but they also allow for surprise and spontaneous self-expression. “Even the most sophisticated shoppers have no idea what they want, and they are begging you to take them on a journey,” Gene Pressman, the former co-CEO, creative director, and head of merchandising and marketing for Barneys New York, told me in an interview this summer.
In his new memoir, They All Came to Barneys, Pressman, whose grandfather was Barney himself, talks a lot about fashion as “showbiz.” (He, too, hated when people called Barneys a department store; it was a “specialty store.”) You could expect to see actual Hollywood stars shopping at Barneys, but it was also a place where regular New Yorkers could meet, mingle, and fall in love in some way, shape, or form. “Barneys was more than stuff,” Pressman writes. “It was a relationship we had with people. It was pleasure; it could be like a drug.”
Pressman reveals a little too much about his own adventures with sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll in the book, but I love the way he talks about shopping—as a dramatic, intoxicating love affair full of passion, trust, and sometimes betrayal. It’s about taking risks and maybe going one step too far. These feelings poured out during our panel on gift guides, too. Gift-giving is inherently relational, of course, and the guides themselves can be intimate and emotional, certainly more than just your average shopping list. “To me, it’s a literary product,”
said of the form. compared the most revealing gift guides you find online to “folk art.”Although shopping newsletters may exist online and in your inbox, the best ones bring to life the same comedy and tragedy of in-person shopping. They aren’t trying to convince you of another made-up TikTok aesthetic. (Trends like “strawberry girl” just sound like a pet name concocted by Jeff Bezos.) And they aren’t trying to make shopping seem like a particularly highbrow pastime, either. (The genius of a play like Oh, Mary! is arguably its similar relationship to theater.) Instead, they are openly, proudly unhinged, or an honest reflection of what it feels like to be alive today.
At the last event I hosted, I asked readers to do a dramatic reading about a time they went to extreme lengths for a purchase. It was inspired by my own sick and twisted journey with a demonic Prada bag—literally, there is a tiny demon on it—which almost ended one of my closest friendships. They were vulnerable tales, but the energy in the room was supportive and sympathetic, like a meeting of Shopaholics Anonymous.
Monday felt similarly confessional and conspiratorial, in the best way. After the event, a friend—who actually introduced me to my boyfriend at one of her own events—texted me, “Honestly, all I could think about through each panel was: Fuck, I love shopping so much.”
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Why is this in my feed?
This is the opposite kind of content I'm on substack for, I'm not sure why this was recommended to me, yikes.