Re-capturing Teenage Girlhood through Group Rituals a the Shopping Mall
Beauty Stand, 3005 reflects on the role of the mall as something that goes beyond consumerism, representing a specific form of social experience that is active yet casual. What becomes of this social ritual in a world where shopping has become an increasingly fragmented virtual experience?
In the 2000s, shopping malls served as a central hub for teenage girls, where social dynamics were shaped and reinforced through the daily rituals of hanging out with friends. Stores like Claire’s Accessories became essential stop-offs, symbolising shared fashion choices and identity formation, while films like Mean Girls captured the social hierarchies that governed these interactions. These fleeting moments of adolescence are evoked in the nostalgia of mall culture, which structured friendships and camaraderie through the exploration of style, social hierarchy, and girlhood rituals.
The rise of online shopping and the integration of AI-driven chatbots have dramatically shifted the teenage shopping experience, depleting the mall culture that once thrived in the 2000s. No longer gathering in stores like Claire’s or sharing moments of camaraderie at beauty counters, teenagers now engage in more isolated, individualised shopping experiences from their devices. The ritualistic, face-to-face social interactions that malls fostered have been replaced by algorithm-driven recommendations and virtual assistants that mimic human communication.
This work by Xcessive Aesthetics aims to recapture and reflect upon the role of the mall and beauty shopping in the shared moments of teenage girlhood, evoking the rituals of meeting friends at the mall in the early 2000’s. Using the nostalgia of beauty-counter spaces as a starting point, the daily rituals and social dynamics of teenage life are recreated and transformed within the contemporary context of an increasingly virtual and screen-based existence, where products are dematerialised, and interactions are increasingly algorithmic. This installation revisits the adolescent social experience of the beauty stand, aiming to reimagine the way these spaces are navigated, the modes of communication that manifest around them and the way beauty products are used as tools to engineer and broadcast our desired identities. Drawing on nostalgia for the peak era of mall culture, we invite the viewer to experiment, interact and question what becomes of these rituals in a world increasingly curated by algorithms.