When Teenagers Go Shopping: Should parents act as stylists or stay outside the changing room door?
The youth of every generation, it seems, finds a way to keep parents out of its shops. When I was young—a phrase which causes my children to roll their eyes, and at which I remember rolling my own eyes when I was young (there I go again)—it was ear-achingly loud music to which the shop “assistants” were self-absorbedly gyrating while ignoring the customers. The atmosphere was more disco than retail, and it had the desired effect: any parent unwise enough to enter would soon make tracks for the door.
Today’s solution is even simpler. Instead of going for the ears, they go for the eyes. As anyone will know who has been inside a branch of the upmarket teen-brand Hollister, they just turn the lights off. Or at any rate, they’re on so low that, for anyone over 30, they might as well be off. You feel as if you’ve wandered into someone’s bedroom in the small hours. Tables hold piles of fabric, which you guess are clothes. If, once night-vision has kicked in, you are able to discern something clearly enough to be interested in what it costs, you stumble around until you trip over an assistant, who will kindly—so kindly it feels patronising—read the price-label out to you.
Strictly speaking, of course, it is the retailers who erect these “keep out” signs, because they want to profit from our adolescents as they separate from the motherships and explore new planets. And the adolescents are only too willing to buy (I use that word advisedly) into these new worlds of sensory overload.