informal manifesto: part 6 — Experimental Horizons
The informal manifesto traces back the origins of the decline of retail spaces and proposes a new way forward by reintroducing informality to shopping. It drafts the intellectual framework underpinning Informal Retail, a startup which installs retail embedded within existing local businesses and stocks them with a rotating selection of brands.
6. informality 3: experimental horizons
A traditional luxury brand being placed on a shelf near a young vibrant emerging brand would be incredibly difficult to orchestrate in a formal context. In an informal context it only requires a quick approval from both parties, and feels natural, almost fortuitous. They both stand to gain from this adjacency without seemingly having taken an active part in its planning. The luxury brand finds youth and relevance in a changing world, the emerging brand finds legitimacy and validation.
This informality can actually greatly benefit existing formal strategies by allowing testing which would be outside of the brand’s usual limitations and pressures in formal contexts. Cultivating an informal retail strategy provides brands with meaningful grounds for experimentation, exploration, and fun.
Reconnecting through analogous mechanics of the mind to the golden era of shopping, of the wonder of department stores, the presence of an informal installation is much like a hall of mirrors. It “sets up a dialectical relationship between setting and viewing subject, the territory of life, the social ground; it does not leave the [product] isolated from its surrounding context, but embeds it in its environment. It intersects and interferes with reality while giving rise to new meanings, new ways of seeing, new interpretations.”*
*Habsburg, Francesca Von, Agnes Husslein-Arco, and Daniela Zyman. Olafur Eliasson Baroque Baroque. Berlin: Sternberg, 2015. Print.
