Rav Casley Gera

Shopping. It’s an enjoyable, but not exactly enriching way to spend an afternoon. You’ll come home tired, probably happy, maybe a little worried about how much you’ve spent. But you don’t normally come home feeling like you’ve really had your world expanded, like yourhorizons have widened -not like you might after a day visiting art galleries, for example.

Well, at least that’s traditionally been the case. But no longer, because yesterday I took a wander through the high-class stores of Mayfair - strictly window-shopping, of course - in search of distraction. And I found that the stores of London appear to have gone quietly mental.

First up, I popped into the much-advertised new Abercrombie & Fitch flagship on Saville Row. You know the one - the adverts all over the buses feature a young, shirtless man whose jeans reveal an inch or two of carefully airbrushed buttock. Call me susceptible to advertising, but I thought I’d check it out.

Delicately rammed into a former townhouse, complete with period glimpses of ceiling between the tasteful wood pannelling, it doesn’t feel like a store from the start. The inside is kept dark, so the dedicated lighting can show the clothes to best effect.

Let’s be honest, though. Nobody visits A&F for the clothes, bland Hilfiger-lite as they are. No, A&F’s global domination is based entirely on its shamelessly enjoyable advertising: poster after poster of scuplted, half-dressed all-American youth. Legend has it that the firm send recruiters to midwestern colleges at the beginning of the year to lure excitable freshmen into becoming models. The firm’s notorious magazine A&F Quarterly typically contained pages and pages of nude- and semi-nude young men and (a few) women, with barely a shirt or pair of jeans in sight. As I walk into the store, two dashing young gentlemen are standing by the door, chatting, dressed top-to-toein A&F. They’re not security - they’re lurking inside the door, dressed in the conventional uniform. They’re not there to greet me, like at naffer, more traditional retailers. They ignore the customers completely. They’re just there to shoot the wind, and to look good, while slightly unaware, in their youthful innocence, of how good they look. It’s the A&F brand in a nutshell: a beauty so young and fresh it doesn’t even recognise itself.

Inside the store, and it’s clear the firm is taking the concept to its logical extreme. In place of the endless huge photographs I expected, the store is covered with murals.

Boxers, fencers, baseballers. All male, all about 18, all very, very white (unlike the staff). Muscles and faces poised for the next game, bout, match. And all, naturally, in a state of sporting undress.

It’s bizarre and slightly sinister: Abercrombie-world is a vague, imagined New England, replete with horses, rowing, blue blood and harldy a girl in sight. Its homoeroticism is so blatant it’s almost funny - see the pair of bared bottoms towards the right of the picture above? - but it’s all so tightly wound up with images of the nobility of sport that it’s kept from the surface. Indeed, what’s so odd about A&F is that, for all its famed nudity, the world it conjures up is incredibly sex-free. Like those boring, preppy clothes, I suppose.

A staff member stopped me from taking any more photos, so you’ll have to check it out for yourself. But do. Seriously. It’s like wandering into some sort of gay-fantasy alternative frat house, part Chariots of Fire, part Brideshead Revisited. I haven’t even mentioned the gigantic rowing mural. Or the statue.

I took my leave, and started to head up towards Oxford St. But my head was turned by a luggage store just off Hanover Square.

It’s not the yellow, as much as the armor - like some sort of space-age Boudicas - that makes these two so disarming. But as impressive as they are, they were nothing compared to their friend at the back of the store.

Yes, it’s a Gigantic Naked Plastic Yellow Man. With a speaker in the back of his leg, which shows a marvellously pragmatism on the part of the designers, I suppose. The shop was closed, and I couldn’t see from outside how far up he actually went. Could there be a whole mega-man, going up four stories, with further speakers in his shoulder blades? Or does he end, just out of sight, just above his shapely plastic arse?

I couldn’t face wondering, so I took my leave. After being assulted with male nude imagery at two stores, I turned to a more trustworthy purveryor of goods. Surely Selfridges, I thought, can be counted on to provide a sensible, understated shopping environment. As the spectacle that presented itself to me as I reached Oxford St demonstrates, I was wrong.

What the? Why is there an eyeball floating, menacingly, outside Selfridges? I thought perhaps the strains of a day’s shopping were getting to me. I stepped in for a closer look.

Yep. There was definitely a gigantic eyeball floating above the head of Creditia, the god of shopping, or whoever that is. What the hell was going on?

It turns out that Selfridges, in its capacity as sponsor to the V&A Museum, has got into the swing of the current Surrealism exhibition. The eyeball (also known as, ahem, “The Sum of All Reasons”) is just one of the surreal delights included instore. Other delights include a (slightly rubbish) lounge of circus-style surreal delights in the basement, and - rather fantastically - surrealist poetry printed on the backs of till receipts.

It’s all pretty wonderful, and a neat reminder that Selfridges is a hundred times better than Bloomingdale’s or Macy’s. Nevertheless, I did wonder once or twice if it wasn’t all getting in the way of some otherwise enthusiastic customers’s attempts to actually get some shopping done.

I’d had enough. I took my leave, and headed off to the ICA, to the comfortable, unchallenging world of contemporary art. Shopping’s too avant-garde for me.

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