Last week I went in search of the dream.
This happens occasionally to some women – men too ? I don’t know – but the dream is that somewhere there will be something that will make us feel better, younger, more attractive and more acceptable to ourselves as well as others – a cream, a hair colour, a new garment . And the enormous industries that attend upon all these – makeup and hair cosmetics, and the clothing industry for starters – have exploited this probably originally seasonal yen for all they are worth, we know we can’t really afford it (which varies in degrees of reality) but our compromise is to go and look. It’s part of shopping.
So last week I went to look. I’ll spare you a list of what I didn’t like, but I very much enjoyed the act of looking, whether at other people doing the same thing or clothes or books – just looking. And latterly I went into a famous cut price store where I saw a face mask in a bottle which has stayed in my mind’s eye.
I admit I loved wrappings,
Wal and Howard are star wrappers because Wal can wrap anything so that you want to open it while Howard can just wrap anything, hospital corners on expensive papers. I am not good with my hands. I admire people who are.
Packaging has developed so that there is more and more of it, it’s a big part of the sell and it’s all thrown away,, complete waste so you can see why it clutters the earth. The bottle took me back to childhood when briefly I collected bottle of shapes that pleased me. The face mask was allegedly rose based, faintly pink which may be nothing to do with roses but the bottle was heavy square glass,
sealed of course with a label. No other wrapping.
Nowadays we accept wrapping, starting with fruit and vegetables routinely from paper and plastic bags. You can understand and be grateful for tinned food because it lasts but everything else comes wrapped within an inch of its life – and we throw most of it away.
Multiply this by 100 per cent if you are talking about any kind of luxury. And of course the makers want it to look luxurious because they appeal your envy, your sense of belonging, your insecurities and the wrappings have multiplied. Cellophane, cardboard, plastic, synthetic but real looking ribbons, to catch your eye. I am going back for that face mask, if I can ever find it again, not because I give a darn about the product but it is so refreshing to see something I could immediately relate to. The rest of the shopping dream completed eluded me. I bought a reduced silver cleaning cloth for the teaspoons, two reduced odour eating candles, and potatoes for supper.
My string bag is black from Longchamps – but you get my drift!
And I thought about packaging, surface, how easily we say “What you see is what you get” though life is rarely so straightforward. You can mean it as a compliment as in “He’s not always easy but he’s honest” or you can use it dismissively as in “Looks like a choirboy, wonder how that plays ?”
Billy Graham
We also say “Never judge a book by its cover” though President Zelensky
obviously believes that we do – so he wears the colours of his fighters because they’re in a war with which he is absolutely identified. And generations of film stars and sports stars, celebrities from A to Z , politicians of every kind, the girl who got on, the man who wanted the top job – they all dress the cover because they know that’s the first thing you see. Occasionally there is an exception – but they usually cultivate the packaging by ignoring it so they look as if their minds on more important things – but it is still we, the onlookers, who pick up and interpret – or misread – the message.
In the business of encounter – who you speak to , who you ignore, who you notice, what you feel about them from the first moment you see them, how you classify them, what you expect of them – you may no longer have a keen sense of smell or a keen sense of self – but what you notice and respond to is the packaging.
Annalog 