The flaneur is a key figure for understanding consumption, as he is linked with the experience of the phantasmagoria of the modern city and its commodities, leisure places, marketplaces, and shop displays.

The French word flanerie denotes the activity of ambling and strolling through the city without a specific purpose, if not that of observing and experiencing the city itself, its people, and its events. The person (typically male) who engages in this idling activity, the flaneur (or flaneuse, if female), is a figure who derives delight and pleasure from the life of the city streets, moving among the urban crowd with the watchful and critic eye of the artist. He is typically a well-dressed man, strolling leisurely through the arcades of the nineteenth-century Paris—at least ...