Renewing a historical legacy: Tourism, leisure shopping and urban branding in Paris

• Leisure shopping per se is a target for city branding.
• Public-led tourism marketing organisations are involved in promoting leisure shopping.
• In Paris, leisure shopping branding draws on a set of consolidated images.
• Social and cultural “urban myths” are used to mitigate a consumerist image.
• The changing relationships between urban branding and consumer capitalism are highlighted.

This article discusses a form of urban tourism branding based on the archetypical form of consumerism: leisure shopping. Commodity fetishism is instrumental not only to increasing mainstream fashion sales but also to rejuvenating and multiplying city images on the global competitive market. Drawing from fieldwork performed in Paris, the article analyses and discusses the strategies developed by key players to promote leisure shopping for urban tourists. It specifically focuses on the actions of public-led tourism marketing organisations. Paris is historically renowned as a capital of style and a commercial metropolis, which can easily be used as a basis to develop urban branding strategies for promoting tourism. However, urban branding based on leisure shopping per se was rarely fostered until recently. Previous theoretic reflections on urban development and consumption – leading to debates on the “fantasy city”, the “cultural-creative city” and “local shopping streets” – provide the analytical basis for understanding the promotion of leisure shopping as an urban tourism branding strategy in Paris and the changing relations between urban political economy and consumer capitalism.