009: Shop Till You Drop

The alienating experience of being a person of color in a luxury retail space

Naomi Campbell for Vogue, 1990, photographed by Peter Lindbergh; Yasmeen Ghauri for Elle France, 1993, photographed by Gilles Bensimon

A few years ago I used to read a column called Critical Shopper. In it, writers penned their experiences interacting with mid-range to high-end retail spaces, the aesthetics and design of the store as well as its contents. Overall, their experiences were pleasant, and each time I read a new entry I imagined how radically different it would read if the author were a person of color.

Luxury retail spaces have an acute ability to make me feel Tom-Thumb tiny. For some time I chalked it up to my low self-esteem, that I had entirely imagined a dreadful sensation of not belonging, of feeling cast aside and out, and had come to embody those feelings. Though I have spent the majority of my adult years living in New York – retail mecca and one of the esteemed fashion capitals of the world – it wasn’t until I had plodded along into my thirties that I had dared to enter high-end designer stores.

While the fashion-conscious set of my generation lamented the end of Barneys and high-tailed it Uptown for its Legendary closing sale, I had never once, in all my time in New York, been to Barneys (I did however score a pair of disintegrating-silver Margiela Tabi pumps from a seller on eBay who had excavated them from said sale). My heels never clattered on the stone floors of Bergdof Goodman, never ascending its famed mirrored-wall escalator. In Soho, I navigated past throngs of shoppers and admirers in line to enter the hallowed halls of Chanel and Prada.

As a child growing up in the suburbs of London, Oxford Street was where visiting relatives were taken to tour. Harrods was where my parents took our visitors to purchase tokens to commemorate their trip, no more, no less. To my parents, I think, shops like Harrods and Selfridges and Liberty weren’t sites of fun and fantasy, of imagination and play, but rather places we didn’t belong. If we couldn’t afforded it, we had no business being there, and we were made to feel as much.

One would have to be incredibly naive to view the position of people of color in the fashion industry – from those who craft to those who consume – through rose-tinted glasses. During the years I worked in various retail jobs, it was the people of color we were advised to be on high alert for, but they were not the ones who cleanly made away with hundreds to thousands of dollars worth of merchandise (despite also learning in training that it was the well-to-do shoppers who had the money to spend to also felt most entitled to steal). If this is the bias with which we are trained to approach people of color in retail spaces, when the roles are reversed and I am so cognizant of this bias, how am I to perceive myself in these spaces?

When I left my hang-ups at the door to permit myself the experience of luxuriating in luxury retail, I found that my trepidation was not unfounded. Entering luxury retail spaces as a person of color in New York – and yes, by the average American standard, New York is indeed perceptibly more diverse, however how people of color are perceived is still shaped by a distinctly American education of othering – is largely a hostile experience. Having worked so many years in retail in America, from the suburbs of Maryland to Union Square, the emotional labor required in this line of work is exhausting. I have no expectation to be treated any more than the very bare minimum in these spaces, but the emotional labor required to treat a person of color distinctly different from one who is white (I almost began writing ““right”) seems like mental gymnastics with no reward other than upholding racial stereotypes.

From being overtly ignored and being told that I cannot try something on for no reason other than that they have the power to say so, to condescension and icy treatment and being tracked like a hawk, enough indignities have occurred to absent me of any desire to return to these places. Although nothing compares to the brick-and-mortar, being able to touch and try on, online shopping feels “safer”. This racialized treatment also reinforces the notion of otherness and our invisibility before white customers, and I am no stranger to being jostled by the lumbering boyfriends of girls big on TikTok and ladies who lunch. I have, however, come to realize that these conditions are a reflection of the broader fashion industry’s stayed position on diversity and inclusion, which is happening whether they like it or not.

That I am treated with warmth by people of color in the same space where a white person has made me feel so invisible that I may have later cried, speaks to the tension and struggle to accept the reality of a changing fashion landscape. More and more people of color are taking up space and insist on recognition. And what we don’t receive, we create for ourselves in the form of councils, committees, groups, publications and more that celebrate and bring dignity to the experience of being a person of color operating within the fashion industry.

This cultural shift is, nonetheless, being acknowledged and upheld by some true gems of luxury retail in New York (not all hope is lost!). There is, for example, the doyenne of luxury retail, Ola at The Row, who conducts herself with utmost dignity and kindness, and takes an egalitarian approach to everyone who enters the Temple of The Row, patrons and worshippers alike. Or take Ashley at Loewe in Soho, who despite my inability to shell out thousands, leaves me feeling remarkably good about myself after each excursion, which I think is just the afterglow of feeling seen. I’m fairly certain there is a decent ROI in decency alone.

This alienating experience of being a person of color in a luxury retail space is not mine alone. My mother stiffens with reluctance whenever I suggest we go inside a shop. I have been with friends who are also people of color, and from the whiplash of disdain, our faces are plastered with frozen smiles, our heads buzzing, and have witnessed Black, brown, and Asian customers being treated with such distasteful prejudice. Superficial diversity – magazine spreads and runways peppered with people of color – does nothing to address and dismantle systemic racism. Without the innovation, labor, and imagination of people of color, the fashion industry would frankly cease to exist; it’s about time everyone, from the sales floors to the mastheads, acknowledge and appreciate the weight of that.