Fashion is a phenomenon that reaches far beyond clothes, influencing social and cultural behaviors. Is there a way to not be a slave to them?
Tag: consumerism
The author remembers a Chandigarh of proportion and quiet pride and mourns what its beauty has become.
While billionaire Jeff Bezos turns Venice into a vanity set, the Prado museum in Madrid is currently featuring a major exposition of legendary Venetian painter Paolo Veronese. What was true in the Renaissance is almost true today: Art, power and decadence intertwine in the city that learned to live from its own sinking.
When French president Emmanuel Macron unveiled a dedicated passage for the Mona Lisa, the Louvre promised relief from crowds. Instead, it offered a stark preview of museums’ surrender to spectacle: galleries as curated stages where art is secondary to the social-media moment.
Clothing, air travel, food: we are once again consuming as if the climate crisis didn’t exist. But it may provide much needed clarity about how to actually protect the environment.
The Argentine comic strip, who is now about to get its own Netflix series, was created at a time when Latin America was going through political censorship. A testament to Mafalda’s innocent-but-serious attitude toward world problems, an excellent example of how young people often see more clearly than the rest of us.
The new “Sneakers” exhibition in Dusseldorf features pairs that sell for six figures and explores how the simple sports shoe became a global obsession.
Sales of vinyl have tripled in the past five years in France, and Paris trails only Tokyo. In this age of dematerialization, LPs symbolize a return to a ceremonial approach to music, a taste for beautiful objects and a desire to give and collect.
Streaming video channels that allows interactive home shopping has been booming in China, and is beginning to win over customers abroad as a cheap and cheerful way of selling products to millions of consumers glued to the screen.
The practice of gift giving exists in every culture in the world, and has for as long as recorded history. What does it tell us about the nature of human society?
In Egypt and elsewhere in the region and the world, families and movements are mobilizing against companies that support Israel’s war on Gaza. The power of the people lies in their control as consumers — and the list of companies and brands to boycott grows longer.
Industrial-style farming should certainly be reimagined, but not with a guilt-ridden assault on the livelihoods of millions of farmers, herders and fishermen.
With the rise of influencers has come a sub-category: deinfluencers, who tell their followers what NOT to buy instead of promoting products in an effort to reduce wasteful consumption.
PARIS — The city of lights is littered with advertisements for “Black Friday” deals. Of course, virtually none of the city’s residents will celebrate Thanksgiving — and few probably even know that the traditional Friday shopping day is linked to the uniquely American (always-on-Thursday) holiday. To receive Eyes on U.S. each week in your inbox, […]
“Dottoré, do you have 1.50 euro by any chance?”
Our roving Swedish reporter’s darkish holiday dispatch from Sofia, Bulgaria.
-Analysis- PARIS — Did they really have to set France on fire for just a few cents? More than eight weeks after it began, the revolt of the “yellow vests’ still seems hard to grasp. For extremists on all sides who happily fanned the flames, it looked like the much-awaited beginning of the great revolution, […]
-Analysis- BEIJING — The “invisible poor” has become a new online — and ironic — moniker in China. It describes young people who earn more than 10,000 RMB ($1,570) a month, a considerable income for most Chinese, but who are also big spenders. They wear $500 suits, get regular facials, drink top-class Chilean wine, and […]
To some, it is simply a delicious chocolate hazelnut spread; to others, it is a key factor for understanding the difficulties of the European common currency.
The streets of Mexico’s capital are littered with plastic and styrofoam, the constant remnants of an irresponsible culture of consumption, an essayist writes. If we can’t change simple habits only we can control, no summit or government in
More consumer spending in the short term, and a demographic correction over time, but China’s loosening of its birth policies may be most powerful as a symbol.
Of all the milestones along the road to human civilization, none is more profound than the advent of reading and writing. But in the name of interactivity, the 21st century is marked by the shallow language of social media that risks burning all our acqui
Protecting the environment is not about “reconciling” man and nature, it’s about giving each their due space. In large part, this means concentrating people in cities.
To the chagrin of climate change deniers, the pontiff’s environmental encyclical says there are no reasonable doubts that global warming is caused by human activity.
Malls, not walls, in Germany’s capital, but can it compete with the Internet?
TEL AVIV — “A few steps away from the all the urban fuss …” And so begins the seduction advertized on the website of a unique approach to the city shopping mall. It is indeed hard to imagine a public consumer space as beautiful as this one. Historical stone houses meticulously restored, neatly cut lawns, […]
A Latin American writer describes a single moment in time in Miami, where the sad contradictions of American culture were on full display.