rumored Neil Young concerts or a trip to an unpronounceable island where her friends haven’t been – than an enviable object. Lavish experiences can be more widely and effectively flaunted via social media than beautiful items, of course, which are best coveted by a discrete audience of first-hand witnesses. In its golden age, we have every reason to forget that luxury shopping actually was an enriching sensory experience on its own. In high temples to American acquisitiveness – like the former B. Altman , now a CUNY campus – one would wander dizzily between counters and racks of dresses and scarves, and leave laden with shiny packages. But these are things I’ve only seen in the movies. According to Hollywood’s account, there
bizarre takes on the mundane, like a silver “tin can” for $1,000 – anything to make the well- known label seem unusual. What one does or eats and with whom – or what one can be seen and documented doing – matters more than the old fashion labels in the new field of authoring identity through social media. It used to be one’s outward appearance primarily that first told the world who we were, without our having to say a word. The Southern master of 20th-century malaise Walker Percy wrote about the needless clothes-shopping impulse as a side effect of the overthought self-image in a memorable footnote to his 1983 mock self-help book Lost
in the Cosmos . It rang so true to my late teenage self that I’ve never forgotten it: “What does a woman mean when she says ‘I don’t have a thing to wear,’ when in fact she has a closet full of clothes? While her statement seems absurd to her husband or a connivance to get more clothes, she is telling the truth. She does not have a thing to wear because all the things hanging in her closet have been emptied out and become invisible.” Or, “What we buy is who we are,” as Underhill says. But these days, “You don’t have to show your labels. You can show where
were models – like Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe, and Betty Grable in How to Marry a Millionaire – whose whole job was to try on outfits for prospective shoppers. And there were attendants, like Joan Crawford in The Women , whose lives revolved around spraying innocent women with perfumes they didn’t want and seducing their husbands. (America, we’re to understand, was great once.) Today’s shoppers just don’t bend to traditions. Millennials of means, Underhill says, favor “experiences” much as their parents do. And when they go after things, they’re unique, personalized, or at least of an uncommon vintage. Trying to keep up, Tiffany now turns out
Lavish experiences can be more widely and effectively flaunted via social media than
beautiful items, of course, which are
best coveted by a discrete audience of
first-hand witnesses.
American Consequences | 41
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