Retail Apocalypse

Shopping is history, in both senses of the word. As shopping shifts online and the economic shocks associated with the COVID-­19 pandemic push bankruptcies to unprecedented levels, retail is facing its own version of the end of days. The arsenal of commercial techniques that retail has developed can no longer function as usual. The entangled worlds of architecture, fashion, business, and art that supplied those techniques now appear to us in a new way. At the same time, retail’s techniques of attraction and distraction have become visible in a new way. ‘Retail Apocalypse’ presents a compendium of case studies, interventions, and object lessons rescued from the bonfire of retail culture.