Shopping in Dubai

Dubai has carved a niche for itself in the popular imagination as a shopping Mecca. The sartorially weak, the infirm, and people who have never even walked (in Prada) visit this Arabian Lourdes and are miraculously cured. People travel thousands and thousands of miles to Dubai just to shop, a recent marketing slogan doing the rounds, straddling the border of genius and stupidity exhorts visitors; “Do buy in Dubai”. In fact so central is shopping to the Dubai lifestyle that the Emirate has actually invented a holiday which it calls the ‘Shopping Festival’. There is none of the religious pre-text that generally accompanies other shopping-sprees like Christmas; the Dubai shopping festival is a pure, undiluted, and unashamed celebration of consumerism. The festival is not a time for family, it is not the remembrance of some significant long ago event, it is not about sharing or giving, it is a time for simply celebrating your freedom to buy things from malls for slightly discounted prices. In un-spun terms the “Shopping Festival” is really just an end of season sale where you can pick up the odd end-of-line designer bargain. Despite this diaphanous re-branding and over-exaggeration of the sale concept, the spin seems to work, and millions of pilgrims/tourists flock to this sun blessed shopping utopia in January and February of each year.

In line with this commercial ethos, the UAE, and in particular Dubai, boasts a mall infested landscape. There are more malls per head of population in Dubai than anywhere else on the planet. As if there was a shortage of places to shop there is currently under construction the ‘Mall of Arabia’ which makes the 1980’s style promise of being the largest mall in the world, fore-telling of 10 million more square feet of shopping space. When Ronald Reagan famously declared of the USA: “we shall be second to no one” he must have meant militarily. Dubai aims to have the biggest mall and amusement park in the world stealing both titles from the US. Bigness, why, and at what cost? Is an important question, a recent USA Today headline reads “UAE Beats America’s Environmental Harm”. According to WWF data the average person in the Emirates puts more demand on the global ecosystem than any other, giving the country the world's largest per-capita "ecological footprint,"; the United States runs second, sorry Ronald.

I have visited most of the big shopping malls in Dubai, but 2 in particular stand out for me. The first is Burjuman mall which is a hive of designer boutiques Donna Karen, Christian Lacroix, Fendi, to name just a few. This is one of the higher end malls and is always teeming with tourists and locals stalking their latest designer prey whilst sporting the fare from their previous expeditions, Louis Vuitton handbags and Chanel shades appear a perennially popular combo. As I walked through this mall I began to have something of a panic attack. The deeper I went into the mall the more overpowering the advertising became, every spare inch of wall space housed huge indoor billboards projecting images of impossibly glamorous models pouting and posing in close proximity to a spectrum of banal products, bags, shoes, perfume. In the background I could hear the infectious slurred hook of a 50 cent song playing; “Man you's a window shopper, mad at me, I think I know why”. The further inside the mall I went the larger and more overpowering these images became until I imagined I had been reduced to the size of an ant and left to roam chaotically over the pages of an abandoned copy of Vogue magazine for all eternity.

The second mall to strike me was the massive Ibn Batutta mall. This mall is named after the African, Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Batutta, a 14th century explorer who traversed 73,000 miles, outdistancing his near contemporary Marco Polo and actually reaching China. Ibn Batutta vividly documented his travels in a work entitled A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling . In keeping with the explorations of Ibn Batutta the mall is themed after the various places visited by the explorer, India Hall, Persia Court, China Gardens, The Garden of Lions. Each of the halls boasts something of an exhibition; a life-sized Chinese ship/junk in China Court, a life-sized automated wooden elephant in India, and a larger than life replica of the garden of the lions is to be found in Andalucia/Spain. Additionally throughout this mall there are informational and museum-style exhibits, old swords, coins, navigational equipment etc. Shopping, history, and the science of navigation seem at first glance unhealthy bed fellows, but there are enough captive and jaded shoppers to just about make it work. One of the things I noticed about myself as I walked through this mall was that I lit up and became excited every time I saw a branded store that I associated with England, “look there’s a Next, wow look they even have a Woolworths and a Mothercare” This strikes me as particularly bizarre as these aren’t even stores I shop at. Traversing the mall-scape a further reminder of globalization hits you as familiar tribes of teenagers congregate in front of Starbucks. These teenagers are Arab and Indian versions of the same mall rats from back home, spiky haired wannabe boy band types, bandana wearing wannabe 50 cents, and the baggy jean sk8er boy brigade, in fact the full spectrum of western teen culture is on parade. However one distinguishing factor amongst all the familiar branded stores and branded teen identities are the small groups of Emerati men dressed from head to toe in white and the larger groups of Emerati women slightly more decoratively gift wrapped in black. About the ancestors of these city-dwelling sedentary Arabs, Ibn Batutta wrote:

[they] are very elegant and clean in their dress, most of them wear white garments, which you always see fresh and snowy. They use a great deal of perfume and kohl… The [women] are extraordinarily beautiful and very pious and modest. They too make great use of perfumes to such a degree that they will spend the night hungry in order to buy perfumes with the price of their food… When one of these women goes away the odour of the perfume clings to the place after she has gone.

If Ibn Batutta sat sipping a caramel frappachino today, his observations in relation to the modern day Emerati mall goers would need little revision. Emerati men are still usually clad in snow-white box-fresh robes and the women still leave perfumed contrails as they float elegantly across the mall-scape. I doubt, however, if these days many Emerati women need to forsake their meals in order to afford their ration of Coco Chanel. In addition to the Channel be-drenched air space surrounding the black abaya clad shoppers there is also an affected air of 19th century Parisian grace, all trailing hem lines, small steps, straight backs, raised chins, and limp wrists; more often than not the limp wrist projects some huge gemstone encrusted display of wealth.

If shopping were an Olympic sport then the Emerati women would take gold, silver and bronze, dominating in the way the Eastern European women used to dominate athletics. Shopping may not yet be a sport, but there are still prizes up for grabs, one of the malls has a logic defying raffle, where the highest bill/receipt wins. This ensures that the person least in need of the prize gets it. The raffle prize at one mall is currently a private jet, although I’m not sure if that comes with flying lessons or your own personal pilot.