Man At C & A (No Slave To Fashion) (C&A)

Member Name: assethound

Product:	C&A
Date:	17/09/00 (230 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great if you like smart casuals...and installation art.

Disadvantages: Who likes smart casuals? - and I could have done with that Saab 900.

When I met my partner, he was known as the man at C&A. This was not entirely complementary, as his mother bought many of his clothes for him, mainly from the monday market. As a result he has a number of "items" in his wardrobe (and he has got more clothes than me) that can only be described as the kind of smart casuals modelled by Alan Partridge in his show "A Partridge In Paris". A poem I wrote for him one Valentine's Day may conjure up a few choice images for you:

Man At C&A
(No Slave To Fashion)

More dislocated than hip.
He's a space cadet without a ship.
When fashion called he was off out,
Buying up Morrison's own brand stout.
A C&A card's one of his few vices,
With a quick "oo 'eck" and "look at these prices!"
South of France and he's tres ele-gant
With his Dad's flat cap at a rakish slant.
A well curled lip and a pungent fart
To Paris designers and Modern Art.

I think that this sums up the image problem that C&A had for a long time. They were seen as a high street retailer that is well behind the cutting edge of contemporary fashion, and catered to a rather conservative end of the market. Think of C&A and you think conventional. It was no surprise when they finally turned up their toes (clad in wool/polyester mix slippers no doubt).

The most astonishing thing to me about C&A is the current show by installation artist Michael Landy - "Break Down", which is taking place in C&A's former flagship store on Oxford Street.

Running from February 10th for two weeks, Landy's show consists of him destroying everything he owns (7006 items), from artworks by Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst, to his Saab 900 car.

Landy's show is an examination of the romance society has with consumerism.

What astonishes me is that he chooses to perform this piece in a C&A store.

C&A is n
ot something I would associate with romance - or consumerism either. It was C&A's inability to offer consumers what they wanted that lead to the chains demise after all.

I have plucked a book from my shelf that offers some very interesting reading about consumerism:

The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851-1914 (Thomas Richards), which has some very interesting passages on the Great Exhibition of 1851, an orgy of consumerism if ever there was one.

ISBN: 0 86091 570 0
£12.95

Summary: