On Sunday I journeyed with Sarah and Emily down to Oxford Street to replace my sorely missed Swatch.\u00a0 I remembered passing the Swatch store on the Number 10 bus to Royal Albert Hall.\u00a0 (Incidentally, Royal Albert Hall was where my watch went missing.)\u00a0 With part of the Central Line closed for maintenance, we decided to take the same bus again.\u00a0 It dropped us off right outside the Swatch store and I quickly found a new watch I really liked.\u00a0 I was planning to post a picture of me wearing it with this blog, but one of the links broke today when I took it off to go through the metal detector at the Hindu Temple and I currently cannot wear it.\u00a0 The city of London apparently does not want me to ever know what time it is.\u00a0 Fortunately, Swatches come with a two year warranty, and I will get it fixed as soon as I get the chance.<\/p>\n
We decided to explore some more of the shops on Oxford Street that afternoon.\u00a0 There were some stores that I had not heard of in the U.S. and some that I had.\u00a0 First, we went into Top Shop, a new store for me.\u00a0 They do operate in the U.S., although it is a British chain, I had just never seen one.\u00a0 The clothes were similar to what we would see at H&M or Forever 21, but significantly pricier.\u00a0 Next, we went into H&M, a store I am familiar with in the U.S., although they are based in Sweden.\u00a0 Although I am familiar with the store, the selection of clothing here was very different from what I am used to seeing in the U.S.\u00a0 The most striking difference was the lack of color.\u00a0 Where in the U.S. you can buy sweaters in a range of colors from bright red to royal purple, everything here seemed to come in the practical, muted colors of white, black, grey, beige, occasionally salmon or olive.\u00a0 It seems that this must be reflecting the English preference for modesty, privacy, and stoicism mentioned by Fox.\u00a0 Perhaps the English feel that wearing bright colors would draw attention to themselves in public, compromising their method of denying that they or the people surrounding them exist outside the privacy of their homes.\u00a0 Wearing bright colors may also indicate earnestness, trying too hard, or taking oneself too seriously.\u00a0 The Importance of Not Being Earnest is a cardinal rule, according to Fox.\u00a0 I reviewed Fox\u2019s chapter on dress codes, but I did not find it very helpful for understanding this; she mostly talks about street sub-cultures and determining class from dress.\u00a0 She does say that the English have little style sense plus a lot of anxiety about dressing appropriately.\u00a0 Perhaps they just sell muted colors to make it easier on themselves.<\/p>\n
Another store we ventured into was Primark.\u00a0 This store was not mentioned in Fox, but it seemed to us like it was the English equivalent of a Wal-Mart, with tables of plain t-shirts and sweaters for 3 or 5 pounds apiece and five pairs of fake pearl earrings for a pound.\u00a0 The scene in there though, did not allow us much space or time to think about class.\u00a0 People were dragging around huge mesh Primark bags and just piling clothes and towels into them, taking handfuls of jewelry and socks.\u00a0 It was unlike any scene I have ever seen in Wal-Marts in the U.S.\u00a0 It was insane.\u00a0 There were 10-12 cash registers in each department, with the queues winding their way through the whole departments.\u00a0 Let\u2019s just say that if I ever go back to Oxford Street, it will not be on a Sunday, but a weekday at, say, 10 am.\u00a0 Reflecting though, it seems that Primark might be the type of store that English lower classes shop out of necessity, upper classes shop in so they can show off their \u201cgreat deals\u201d and that the middle classes wouldn\u2019t be caught dead in.<\/p>\n
We felt just a little bit guilty at first going shopping on Oxford Street instead of visiting a museum or a park, but it turned out to be quite a London learning experience, and definitely something to blog about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Sunday I journeyed with Sarah and Emily down to Oxford Street to replace my sorely missed Swatch.\u00a0 I remembered passing the Swatch store on the Number 10 bus to Royal Albert Hall.\u00a0 (Incidentally, Royal Albert Hall was where my watch went missing.)\u00a0 With part of the Central Line closed for maintenance, we decided to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":444,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6679],"tags":[6756,15095,15097,6777,15096],"class_list":["post-3093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-kaitlin","tag-kate-fox","tag-oxford-street","tag-primark","tag-shopping","tag-swatch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/444"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3093\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}