An analysis of the cultural void pervading the market
I feel an absence everywhere.
In city centers and on the outskirts.
In shops, in museums, in people's faces.
It is not just the end of shopping. It is the end of desire.
A cultural crisis before an economic one.
A crisis of taste, of participation, of attention.
Everything has become a container. And no one asks what it contains anymore.
Milan, like so many other cultural capitals, has been transformed into a permanent showcase.
No longer a city to live in, but a catwalk to walk through.
The recent investigation into Sala and Boeri — beyond the legal implications — tells this story:
a city emptying itself to make way for finance, real estate funds, luxury tourism.
The result is evident:
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shops do not sell,
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people no longer experience the streets,
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shopping malls become climate-controlled deserts,
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boutiques are soulless showrooms.
The data confirms it
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–0.4% retail sales (May 2025)
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–1.3% also for e-commerce (March 2025)
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–34% presence in shopping malls post-Covid
But it is not the fault of digital technology.
It is the fault of a culture that has stopped caring for the purchasing experience as a symbolic and human moment.
We have stripped meaning from gestures, places, objects.
And so people no longer buy, simply because they no longer feel anything.
The creative person today is a marginal figure.
No longer a fashion designer. No longer a designer. No longer an artist.
But an interpreter of a void.
And a reconstructor of meaning.
They are needed in shops, not to sell, but to make an identity resonate.
They are needed in institutions, to rewrite a public visual language.
They are needed in territories, to make the confused desires of an exhausted society legible.
Products are no longer needed.
Thought is needed. Vision is needed. Aesthetic dignity is needed.
I remain to offer a form of attention,
a different way of looking at things — even the simplest ones.
I remain to tell this story of emptiness,
not to fill it with yet another object to buy.
Because shopping is over. But design can still start anew.
I no longer want to sell objects.
I want to sell a form of attention.
Whether it is a dress, a room, a gesture.
Something that lasts, that speaks, that is imperfect but honest.
Something that exists, finally, outside the market, for it has been emptied. Only those who have seen the void can design anew.
—
Maurizio Demelas
SRDN.Backstage Society
Criticism. Style. Survival.