I walked past the old Borders store in Glasgow the other day and had to stop when I saw all the windows lined with hundreds of sewing machines. The shop is being converted into a clothes store. I don’t know if the sewing machines will stay, or if they’re just a screen while they set up the store.
I have one of these beautiful machines handcrafted here in scotland , it was my grandmothers who made all her childrens clothes on it and it reminds me constantly of the vagries of todays throw away society. Quite ironic that it fronts a shop that will probably sell clothes produced in sweat shops in the developing world at exhorbitant profit and shared by very few. Also sad that it replaced a bookstore with a clone of very similar stores in that area
We have just had our old singer repaired …some real creations being made by the girls ………I love the weight of the machine and its solid age resistant qualities.
The window display is inspiring but probably the facade is better than the contents ! Not that I know anything about clothes or high fashion, preferring an old jumper and a pair of shorts. It was a real pity about Borders, maybe Amazon will kill off all of the bookstores .The Tesco of the print world!
Not in Glasgow at the moment, so I haven’t had a chance to see this. Seems a very imaginative and artistic way for them to screen the windows while they work on fitting out the shop – perhaps grounds for hope that the new shop will be a bit more special than the other shops nearby, instead of a clone as Jim suggests?
But I was really sorry when all these Borders shops shut down – not just Buchanan Street; there was a really good one in Inverness too. I suppose the internet is a useful thing overall, but it’s sad that so many shops can’t compete with the likes of Amazon etc. Two of my favourite music shops have shut down recently – Lost in Music in Byres Road with its high-quality second hand CDs of 1960s rock (where will I get my Soft Machine and Blodwyn Pig records now?) and, in April, Classics in the City, where I bought lots of lovely CDs of 16th century choral music. Ordering these things on the net isn’t the same!