Shopping is history in both senses of the word. As shopping shifts online and the economic
shocks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic push bankruptcies to unprecedented levels retail
is facing its own version of the end of days. The arsenal of commercial techniques that retail
has developed can no longer function as usual. The entangled worlds of architecture fashion
business and art that supplied those techniques now appear to us in a new way as a museum of a
culture that is now becoming extinct. At the same time retail's techniques of attraction and
distraction have become visible in a new way. Stripped of their use value they reveal
themselves as techniques of pure display. Retail Apocalypse presents a compendium of case
studies interventions and object lessons rescued from the bonfire of retail culture. It
ranges from Friedrich Kiesler's display windows to Gae Aulenti's Fiat showrooms from J. G.
Ballard's dystopian fantasies to TELFAR's critical utopias from Rem Koolhaas to Herzog & de
Meuron.
