This lavishly illustrated book celebrates one of the most influential and successful retail centers in the world, from its opening in 1965--when it changed the retail landscape by inviting European designers such as Gucci and Valentino to open stores within a shopping mall--until the present day. Theater of Shopping tells the story of retail visionary Stanley Whitman and the creation of Bal Harbour Shops, the most successful luxury fashion shopping center in the world*, and one of the last family-owned malls in America. Written by critically acclaimed author Alastair Gordon, Theater of Shopping is a cultural history of both a place and a personal legacy. The open-air mall opened in 1965 as a pedestrian-friendly environment that turned shopping into a kind of theatrical event, while featuring the work of young design talents like Valentino, Versace, Mugler, de La Renta, and other foreign designers who were unknown in America before first showcasing their collections at Bal Harbour Shops. The text weaves together fashion, luxury commerce, architecture, landscape design, urban development, and family history, to create a highly readable narrative illustrated with more than 300 images including never-before-published drawings, plans and photographs by renowned photographers including Richard Avedon and Ezra Stoller.

From the 1890s to the 1970s, the thriving area of Birmingham between Eighteenth and Twenty-first Streets along First, Second, and Third Avenues was the bustling heart of this quickly growing city. Before the age of the shopping mall, the downtown was the center of retail and entertainment in Birmingham. Along these streets, entrepreneurial immigrants built department storesincluding Pizitz and Loveman, Joseph, and Loebwhile the marquees of the Alabama, Ritz, and Lyric theaters, among others, shined over the busy downtown sidewalks.

On visual perception in film and human subjectivity

Shopping and F***ing is... Falling in love with your best friend - if you can get the right mix of Es and whizz... Passion buried beneath layers of bubble and wrap and cellophane A world where microwaves are the only source of heat A place where Shopping is sexy and F***ing is a job... And if you killed someone what would it feel like? Or maybe there are no feelings left... Shopping and F***ing is a witty and shocking look at a corrosive disposable world whose values have been determined by a disinherited generation.SHOPPING AND FUCKING: "is a darkly humorous play for today's twenty-somethings ... a real coup de theatre" - Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard

This ground-breaking drama was Mark Ravenhill's first full-length play and part of a movement in the 1990s of "in your face" British theatre which frankly dealt with issues of sex and violence and pointedly challenged societal values. The play explores how consumerism has become our new value system which reduces everything else to a mere transaction, as shopping malls become the new cathedrals of Western consumerism. The plot follows a crowd of drifters and sex traders in a seedy area of London in the 1990s. Five main characters are linked loosely and intermittently and at the center of the play is an ever-changing love triangle of petty criminals. It is a gritty, grimy urban society, a depressing microcosm of drugs, shoplifting, prostitution, and sexual adventure. The characters have shunned morality and conduct hedonistic and destructive lives in this shocking, humorous, nihilistic play that examines a completely corrupted society.