Women's History Museum MORT de la MODE....Everything must go!

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Large signage announcing: “STORE CLOSING”, “EVERYTHING MUST GO”, “RETAIL SPACE FOR RENT” is now a common sighting. Perhaps the drying up of retail stores exposes the mirage of fantasies they always were -- the illusions of grandeur they once portrayed evaporating in their financial ruin. Our abandoned shop stands as a relic of these shared spaces -- a tomb of capitalist ills. It is a rumination on the longing for opulence, mitigated by the grim dead ends of our material reality and the undeniable waste of our society. We indulge in manic aesthetics of materialism run amok, all the while striving for a space of fantasy. Fashion itself too is more of a stand in for the longing to transcend the limits of the body. However, in the endless thirst for La Mode, we are always chained to its dependent relationship to the human form and its susceptibility to time, wear, and decay. A transition to virtual commerce is a natural new habitat for shopping mania, with its promise of infinite possibilities and its freedom from corporeality. The perils of online shopping are explored in our video game, Boutique Virtuelle: Massive Disposal, which also examines some of our own questionable obsessions with materialism. The setting of the game is a metaphorical mall meant to embody the main character’s compulsive online shopping habits. Stuck in this dead space, the character must collect items to possibly escape or else remain in a purgatory of lonely delirium. The mode is mort, and still we shop.