Sophisticated Sell

My mother used to use a phrase, "shop like a Frenchwoman," that I never really understood until the summer we spent a month in Normandy. I was 15, and my parents, along with my aunt (my mother's twin) and her family, had rented an old farmhouse on the top of a hill in the rolling countryside. My schoolgirl French was deemed the most passable of the four cousins', so I was the translator for the women's daily trips to the markets of the little town of Manerbe. There I began to get the picture.

If the twins couldn't exactly talk like Frenchwomen, they could cook with the best of them -- and that started with their approach to ingredients. They would pick over baby potatoes, inspect haricots verts for color and crispness, smell herbs for freshness, and poke and prod everything within reach in the outdoor stalls. They'd move from charcuterie to boulangerie , passing over the pâté for some particularly succulent chickens or pointing out the exact baguette they wanted. As often as not, an unexpected or particularly fresh item would result in a surprise twist in the menu.

It wasn't efficient, but we usually came away with a story: a conversation with one of the shopkeepers, a motorbike run amok in the marketplace, a circle back to replace the tarte Tatin devoured in the car on the way home. And, inevitably, the smells, sounds, and textures of the market seeped into our dinner, adding an intense flavor.

These days, for the most part, shopping like a Frenchwoman is a lost art, having vanished somewhere between the sommelier at Costco and the organic arugula now available in virtually every supermarket in America. The multisensory ritual, with its open-ended sense of discovery and the thrill of the hard-won find, has given way to a uniformity of style -- and a stylish uniformity.

And then there is Anthropologie. This vibrant, 40-store women's-clothing and home-furnishings chain has cultivated a shopping experience unlike almost anything else in retail today (including the noteworthy fact that it is growing fast and registering record sales). Grab the hand-forged twisted-metal handle on the massive wooden doors of the Anthropologie store on West Broadway in New York, and something clicks in your shopper's reptilian brain. Your peripheral vision is activated. There's so much to take in that you can't focus on any one thing.

Your eye darts right and alights on what seems to be a Tuscan dining porch, artfully packed with chipped dinnerware, rose-colored drinking glasses,whitewashed iron candlesticks, and weathered mismatched chairs. Just beyond, there is a jumble of fresh, bright wares -- hand-embroidered dishcloths, ceramic colanders, an enormous enameled teakettle -- on an old, rough-hewn French kitchen table that evokes a county fair.

Cast your eye back through the cavernous, high-ceilinged structure, and you get a flash of the Far East. A fringe of rag ribbons hung with glass lanterns marks the entrance to what looks like a stall in a North African souk, laden with embroidered pillows, throw rugs, beaded frames, old fishing baskets, and burnished copper vessels. In scattered vignettes of latticework chaise longues, velvet patchwork pillows, ornate birdcages, leather-bound books, sari fabrics, and teak benches, Morocco blends into Turkey and India mixes with Bali.

Clothing is clustered in minicollections throughout the sprawling space. Flirty skirts and vintage-inspired cardigan sweaters hang beneath red-and-white-striped café awnings; tailored trousers with quirky detailing, embroidered jackets, and lace-edged blouses share space on hand-crafted wood and metal racks; sporty slacks and ethnic T-shirts are piled on antique tables; Chinese pajamas and cobwebby camisoles spill out of an old glass-fronted cabinet. The bold mix of fashion-forward pieces, laid-back staples, and ethnic accents is just what you might imagine for the wardrobe of an itinerant exotic returned to a rich nest in the First World.

It's quite possible to think of Anthropologie as the anti-Gap (and not in the highbrow sense that its Frenchified academic name implies). The Gap pours its investment and creativity into expensive, splashy, celebrity-studded advertising campaigns. Yet, as striking as the spots are, little of the groovy vibe carries over to the actual experience of shopping in the stores (which may be why so many of the Gap's stores are struggling).

"One of our core philosophies," explains Anthropologie president Glen Senk, "is that we spend the money that other companies spend on marketing to create a store experience that exceeds people's expectations. We don't spend money on messages -- we invest in execution."