Adorned in Dreams《摘录》

Cities had always been places where to some extent the individual's origins could be hidden and in which personal qualities rather than rank or wealth were what counted...

[...]huge industrial infernos where truly the stranger could [...] find a new identity in the anonymity of the surging crowds.

The spatial structure of these great new cities intensified the individual's experience of mobility both geographically and socially...

Nietzsche spoke [...] of the fragmentation of identity caused by the 'tropical tempo' of modernity...

[C]ostumes [...] no longer reflected a clear rank or status but rather a socially defined time or day or occasion or an individual state of feeling.

This is a world in which the necessities and rhythms of nature have been abolished: yet at the same time the man-made landscape comes to resemble a freak of nature and to have a life of its own that takes it outside the control of human agency.

[H]e can never leave but only lose himself within its surging turbulent eddies ebbs and flows.

Before the development of buses railroads and trams in the nineteenth century people had never bee in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one another.

There was therefore an eroticism special to the nineteenth-century crowd...

Frotteurism exhibitionism voyeurism are sexual aberrations that rejoice in the stealth and irresponsibility of the crowd.

[T]he constant friction of self with a barrage of sensation and with other personalities generated [...] a more intense awareness of one's own subjectivity than the old uniform and unwavering rhythm of rural and provincial life. In the city the individual constantly interacts with others who are strangers and survives by the manipulation of self.

Life in the nineteenth century was more sharply than before divided between working hours repaid in wages and 'leisure' during which wages could be spent.

Production bred consumption...

[T]he capicalist city invented a fantasy world that was neither wholly a public nor quite a private realm: the department store.

There was a revolution in shopping.

The haggling and bargaining that was still widespread in France in the earlier half of the nineteenth century had not persisted to the same extent in England but to enter a shop still implied a commitment to buy stockes were limited and of course there was nothing ready made. Yet already shopping was a social event.

In the 1830s and 1840s stores selly 'dry goods' (haberdashery cloth cloaks and trimmings) began to appear both in European capitals and in the eastern seaboard cities of North America. The Bon Marché which has usually claimed the title of the first department store opened as a small left-bank piece goods shop in 1852...

Adornment ... which gathers the personality's ... radiance as if in a focal point allows the mere having of the person to become a visible quality of its being.

--Georg Simmel