The standoffish snobbery at Spotlight astounds me. Spotlight, if you don’t know, is an Australian retailer of raw fabric and craft, homemaker-y stuff like buttons, scissors, glue guns, curtains, cows… Okay, maybe not the last, but if they had Spotlight Rural China, it’d qualify as homey. They have a sizeable store (well, by expensive Singaporean mall-space standards, at least) here, which I visited today in search of a good backdrop for a studio shoot I’m conducting soon.

The first thing that hits you as soon as you enter are the reams of fabric just stockpiled all over the place. It looks like a crazy, gigantic version of those tailor shops you pass by in Little India. I’d never shopped for fabric before, and my only experience with Spotlight thus far has been strictly limited to the knick-knack section—yes, abstract as that sounds, the knick-knack section is a full and most legit section on its own; hats, hats for kids, hats for stuffed animals, hats for stuffed animals’ stuff animals… random plastic fruit of all sizes, puffy paint, paint for glass, paint for walls, paint for fabric, paint for wood, paint for plastics, paint for paint’s damned sake…

Phew. So, after much searching, I ploughed through the mountains of animal print, velour, pleather, and various other dragqueen favourites and found the closest fabric to what I wanted, a plainish canvas with a satin sheen on the other side. This took me roughly 45 minutes, so it’s not as if I swooped in and found it like Martha bloody Homemaker.

Bringing it to the counter, the woman curtly pointed out that there simply wasn’t enough fabric on that ream for what I was requesting. So she sent me back, searching for more. When there wasn’t anymore, I ended up returning an hour later renewed, enough to find a substitute.

More snobbery ahead. Carrying it to the counter, I was redirected to another, being told that they didn’t deal with that sort of fabric. I looked at it in my hands. It didn’t look that bad to me. But who was I to argue?

The lady at the second counter asked me how much I needed, only to roll her eyes and walk away in the midst of my explanation (wild gesturing included) in boredom. Returning two minutes later, she asked, “Now do you know what you want?”

Finally explaining what I had in mind, she gave what I can only describe as an uppity-chortle-sneer that the ream clearly wasn’t produced in the fashion I described. So I asked that they join it somehow. “Oh, you want to… sew hah?” She corrected.

“Yes, please… somehow,” I said.

“Very big leh,” she replied.

“I know. Can, Auntie?” I said, realising the minute she bristled upon hearing the term, “Auntie”, that I had made a mistake. (It usually works with most people; it’s my secret weapon!)

“See how, lah!” she finally said, before sweeping off.

A guy was sent shortly after to educate me on the finer points of fabric purchasing: you have to know how much you want (I did!), know how you want it done (I said JOIN them) and to bring someone who’s done it before along (it’s an exclusive club now) when you “explain to Auntie” (hah! He called her that, too.).

The amount of eyerolling and impatient tapping of feet in an empty store at an offpeak hour was incredible. Even more than in camera shops, when they squint at you immediately upon your entering, because “girls cannot take pictures, what.”

Update: Pictures are up on my photoblog.