Americans to consume on an epic scale, and provided the means to
do so through the enablement of loans, mortgages and credit.4
In Europe, the Marshall Plan (1947), directed at the post-war
rebuilding of institutions and society, provided cash and the
commodities upon which it could be spent, and so constructed
another consumer society parallel to and dependent upon America’s
own.5 The prevailing tendency in both situations was the production
and consumption of a limited number of goods that were deemed
to be essential: equipment for the home and for individual mobility.
The demand for items was determined so as to be predictable, and
integrated with industrialized production that had recently been
dedicated to armaments.6 It was only when these ‘essential’ desires
had been substantially fulfilled that more particularized forms of
consumption for a large public were able to re-emerge.
Such forms were not necessarily dedicated to so-called luxury
goods, but to goods that would have been considered exclusive in the
1950s. Such a description held true for the small shops of the arcades.
Particularity, that in some way reflected the specificity of the
consumer’s desires and the actual specificity of individuals and groups
within society, was a quality that was ‘rediscovered’, developed and
exploited. In the United States, this rediscovery was coincident with
the rise of the civil rights movement, student movements and the
visibility and realization of lifestyles other than those of the white,
suburban middle class. By the mid-1960s, people increasingly regarded
themselves as individuals or ‘free agents’ rather than as consumers
with common aims, class or ethnicity. In Western Europe, the careful,
transnational management of Marshall Plan funds7 and the structuring
of states along the broad principles of social welfare-tempered
capitalism led to widespread consumer confidence, although this was
experienced quite differently in each country.
The boutique’s reappearance within fully developed consumer
economies obliged it to relate to mass markets, regardless of its
modesty or particularity to locale. This relation to markets or audiences
was quite different from the business contexts characteristic of the
specialist shops of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and
caused boutiques and their owners to find new ways of representing
and situating themselves in order to retain their ‘uniqueness’.
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