🟧 Is boutique a bad word?
Debating the fetish for niche retail.
Nate Gallant: "Boutique" is an idea I want to like. It has connotations that I think are worth holding onto at the fraught contact point between consumption and aesthetics: Small-scale. Locally-oriented. A specificity in objects gathered around the aesthetic values or orientations of a place, an idea, or an individual. I am not an economic historian, but as a consumer, the boutique feels like a generational response to the death of local commerce experienced by Gen X and millennials in the ‘90s and early 2000s. The only things that seem to disrupt the seismic shifts in international supply chain dynamics whereby Walmart or Dick's Sporting Goods can provide crap at super-low prices are nationalism, pandemics, canal-traffic accidents, and literal piracy. So small-scale proprietors have opted for upmarket, often less utilitarian goods, emphasizing values that range from more sustainable production to extreme specificity in brand or style.
A boutique retail store can be an exercise in taste: A proprietor stocks it with exactly what they like, which customers will presumably also like or even just want to explore. However it's news to no one that the problem is the cost. There seems to have been some kind of shift between the brick-and-mortar life of the boutique as a noun, and an increasingly meaningless existence as an adjective for nearly anything. In the past, I would have been fine (though may not have been able) to pay extra for something I needed or when I desired to participate in the aesthetic of some local store. Now, the word is a glib part of ad-speak for anything photographed nicely and set against an empty white backdrop in an online marketplace. This degradation is merely the life of words in capitalism, especially when all the cultures of consumption are filtered online or driven by digital marketing. Whatever this term had meant in the vague francophonie-lite that continues to be upmarket fashion and design, "boutique" seems to merely put an extra $200 in price between you and potentially well-curated, slower, locally owned and locally produced consumption. Call it the boutique tax.
It could seem illogical that a crossbody bag made on the literal other side of the planet, shipped to the US across impossibly complex sea routes, and then driven around the country in gas-guzzling tractor trailers should cost less than something made by a member of your community who lives a few blocks away. But thanks to global supply chains, the boutique's price point and function within the market makes sense within this particular inversion of space and time. Whether ethical consumption feels impossible to you because of cost or because of the synoptic breadth of late-capitalist dynamics, which politically pit you against your global neighbors when you so much as try to buy a banana, the curated retail store offers an opportunity to consume differently. I do think this is some form of agency, even if it's within the same ecosystem. In this sense, I’m not inherently opposed to the meaning of boutique, per se. I just want a new, more specific word. It will eventually be ruined, too, but such is the lifecycle of culture.
Kyle Chayka: I’m guilty of overusing the word “boutique,” most often favorably. Bemoaning DC’s lack of boutique retail. Hungering for a website or publication that feels boutique. Dreaming of opening a store that’s just a collection of things I find interesting, that other people will miraculously find interesting enough to pay for, too. I constantly think back to this NYT interview with Tiina Laakkonen, who ran an influential design and fashion boutique in the Hamptons for a decade before closing it down essentially because she was bored. (“The aspirational retail world has been taken over by big luxury brands,” she complained.) Who wouldn’t want to do that?? The best boutiques are like wandering the contents of someone else’s subconscious.
But Nate’s offhand comment against the boutique over lunch at Vegz got me thinking. The boutique as an IRL form is a certain archetype: Ina Garten’s specialty food store, again in the Hamptons. A curated Chelsea gallery. Williamsburg’s now-defunct Bird, a store that cemented a particular Brooklyn aesthetic. Psychic Wines in LA. Boutiques establish templates of taste that then ripple outward, like a band inspiring copycats — though it costs money to replicate material style. The boutique’s expensive magpie curation is most often sustained by a wealthy customer base willing and able to pop in for a whimsical purchase worth a few grand. Otherwise, how to pay the storefront rent in cities that are so expensive that many of the storefronts simply lay empty for landlord tax write-offs? Smaller purchases are important, of course, but this isn’t a bookstore where bulk is the only way to ring up a high bill. The niche stores exist on a spectrum of aspirational to inaccessible to completely elitist. (Whereas cheap, globalized Amazon orders, as Nate points out, are totally accessible.)
Still, I wonder if the internet can help eliminate the financial pressures of the boutique format. There’s no rent to pay on a website, though you’ll have to produce content to stay relevant on social media. The Six Bells is a twee, faux-bucolic ecommerce boutique created by Audrey Gelman, of The Wing infamy. It has a storefront in Brooklyn, but it does most of its transactions online, available to anyone. Permanent Collection is a small line of commissioned and curated objects sold online, co-founded by Fanny Singer, the daughter of Alice Waters (if you wondered where the rarefied sensibility came from). It’s guilty of the nice-objects-on-white-backdrops approach that Nate calls out, though I still like it. The internet can route customers toward a sensibility that provides exactly what they want. But digital space lacks the surprise and discovery of a labyrinthine store where secrets hide. Part of the boutique’s charm is its fundamental scarcity.
This newsletter is a digital boutique — of ideas!!! Lol.
Previously on One Thing: A Q&A with a woman creating a family digital-nomad compound and summer school on the Croatian island of Hvar. Is it possible to create a more culturally sustainable version of tourism?
I always appreciated the no-frills Japanese name for a clothing boutique: "select shop"