Themed Retail
A much-observed marketing trend has been the emergence of "experience retail" which amounts to the merger of shopping and entertainment in an explicit "themed" fashion. Themed retail is a strategy for extending the authority of the brand by taking its meanings into ever more diffuse territories of association, a displacement of object by aura. As a result, Times Square is "Disneyfied" and Fifth Avenue becomes "Las Vegas like" as the aura of exuberant consumption permeates the frenzy of shoppers and tourists who flock there.
As Times Square becomes ever more Disneyfied, it echoes a growing trend across the ever-increasingly gentrified city streets: a Potemkin Village of identical mainstream content behind a hollowed-out, discarded locality. Even 125th Street has effectively become the urban analogue to a suburban mall. Cleansed of local identity, the street's once singular, if frayed, character is more and more like any other place, anywhere else... a sad side effect of "progress and prosperity."
