The Flaneur

The Flaneur

I drift along the streets of Fifth Ave. looking at the window displays.

I am a flaneur,

A cultural dandy

A visual imperialist

The clothing is my empire

The register, my means of empowerment

A flaneur is a kind of urban dandy who strolls through a modern city(such as Paris), a space that is newly organized in modernity to encourage a mobile and specular (looking) relationship to urban space and the new consumer goods of mass manufacture displayed there. The flaneur observes urban life through the windows and reflective surfaces of the new city, admist the visual spectacle of the many goods newly available for mass consumption thanks to the expansion of factories and a labour pool of workers in manufacture and industrial production.

When I imagine a modern day flaneur, I see a suit. A well dressed metrosexual man, or more likely homosexual man, roaming the streets of the concrete jungle in New York, looking at all of the displays in the windows, imagining what would look so fabulous on his partner. He has money to blow, bitch.

Or, I also see a rather negative image. It's a Beverly Hills Bitch, the 30 year old gold digging wife of a decrepit 80 year old oil tycoon on a vacation with her girlfriends in Las Vegas. They roam the glossed floors of the Forum in Cesar's Palace and check out all of the designer goods. They too, have money to blow, except it wasn't earned, well, in the conventional sense. They look at all the L.V. shit they can buy up .They too are the flaneur, or flaneuse.

I also ideally see Miss Holly from Breakfast at Tiffany's. She is the ultimate flaneuse, checking out jewellery as she eats her breakfast after a night out. Something yearns in me to see some paparazzi captured photos of Lindsay Lohan eating an Egg Mcmuffin in front of some shop on Rodeo Dr. That would take the cake.