Escaparate : Pedagogía de la modernidad

In this work, Iñaki Gómez Álvarez argues that observing shop windows, both from the street and from inside the stores, is the ideal way to approach understanding modern society. Since the late 19th century, shop windows have attracted the attention of passersby and transmitted the identity and cultural values ​​of modern society to children. Like little flâneurs, with all the time in the world to contemplate the displays, young people use these brief, informal lessons to explore the world, like wide-open illustrated encyclopedias. As impromptu exhibitions, they inspire artistic vocations and, like other forms of street art —billboards, posters, signs, and graffiti— powerfully influence popular and general culture. The variety of topics covered in Escaparate —childhood and its visible changes over the last century, education, social reform, visual culture, art, urban planning, the integration of minorities, traditions, the history of Chicago, and the culture of new electronic devices— lends continuity and rhythm to the essay, while also offering a fascinating anthropological, economic, cultural, and pedagogical approach to modernity. Anyone who wants to know what children learn on the streets should ask the shop windows. Anyone who wants to convey a revolutionary message should not underestimate the power of shop windows. If another great depression is looming, the first sign will be the disappearance of shop windows.