Not With A Bang But A Whimper

Thoughts on shopping and not shopping

I found myself wandering along the aisles of two thrift stores yesterday. I browsed through the racks, one after the other, not looking for anything specific, but “just looking”, like I often do. I came across a Nicolas Ghesquière-era Balenciaga print dress, a beautifully draped Vivienne Westwood skirt, a pair of über-cool Ulla Johnson trousers, and a bunch of older Marni pieces. I found luscious silk blouses, a carefully constructed 1950s wool blazer, and a lovely 1980s polka dot silk dress. I left both shops empty-handed, and it wasn’t even difficult.

There was a time, not long ago, when I thought about shopping constantly. Buying something new filled me with giddy excitement. I enjoyed going to physical shops (mostly thrift stores) and one of my favorite ways to pass the time was to browse Vestiaire Collective or eBay in the hope of finding a rare Dries Van Noten piece for cheap. As soon as I was done with purchasing one thing, I was desiring another. But something has changed. The act of shopping leaves me hollow. 

For some weird reason I’ve thought a lot about ‘The Hollow Men’, the famous T. S. Eliot poem from 1925. The poem contemplates alienation and spiritual emptiness after the horrors of World War I. The “stuffed men” trudge along mindlessly, in want of meaning, but unwilling or unable to bridge the gap between the idea and the reality, where a shadow has fallen. 

Shape without form, shade without colour, 
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

A hundred years later, it seems to me that we, humanity, haven’t been able to shake that feeling of emptiness. It’s just evolved into a different kind of beast. The hollow men of our time link their sense of self to the money they make, the neighborhoods they live in, the cars they drive, the vacations they take and the clothes they buy to wear on those vacations. They buy things because they hope to be something and to feel something. The line between the products they buy and themselves is becoming increasingly blurred and tangled, which is ironic, considering how much effort big business puts in depersonalizing the things we buy. Karl Marx called it ‘commodity fetishism’: the stuff we buy is presented to us as if it was void of the people and their labor that were present and necessary in the production of the said stuff. No wonder the things we surround ourselves with end up feeling so fleeting and meaningless. 

I’ve shopped a lot in my life. I got hooked on shopping in my mid- to late 20s. I bought a lot of fast fashion, then more expensive brands, until I found thrifting, which allowed me to buy as much as I wanted with those crazy bargain prices. At one point I owned over one hundred pairs of shoes and seventy coats, most of which I never had time to wear. I know the feeling of always wanting more like the back of my hand, the craving of new things, the clothes that hang in my closet with the tags still on, and the attempts to normalize my desire to shop by calling it “a hobby”, a “form of self-expression” or “self-care”. I’m no stranger to having thought that it’s perfectly normal to purge one’s wardrobe twice a year and to then fill it up again, until the next purge comes along. It took me years to understand that my problem with shopping had very little to do with the clothes, the accessories and the stuff. It had everything to do with the act of shopping: exchanging money (or worse, credit) for products and the dopamine kick, dressed up in a status- and identity-seeking cloak.

A part of me wishes that I could point to a single moment of realization where things came together for me. I’ve put in a lot of work to understand myself and my behavior. For years I kept looking for a revelation, a moment when my struggle with shopping would somehow make sense; a loud, crushing tidal wave of a feeling that would knock me sideways. Then I could say that I had finally arrived. What I didn’t know was that the revelation would never come, but the solution would be something a lot less dramatic and almost anticlimactic. The only thing that’s noticeable is that the thrill at the check-out (the sweaty palms, the elevated heart rate) is no longer present for me. The act of shopping is weirdly void of emotion. My shopping process from the mid-2000s to today resembles a raging fire that slowly but surely died out and left a few tepid embers and a breath of smoke in its wake. 

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

When Irene Kim recently wrote: “When I look through my wardrobe, when I wear my clothes, the overwhelming feeling I get is…I’m good. I genuinely don’t feel like I need anything, nor do I even want anything. I don’t even want to want anything!”, it resonated. I, too, like Irene, have bought a lot of versatile, good-quality clothes that suit my life over the years, and I’m starting to feel that maybe it’s finally enough. And when Rachel Solomon, with the help of her husband Jim, who’s 17+ years sober, wrote about an 11-point plan on how to combat addiction to Tibi products, it occurred to me that the 11 points seemed very familiar. In the years that I’ve tried to figure out how to stop shopping, I have explored, failed at, got frustrated and angry at, rejected, tried again and again, and finally understood those 11 points myself. It's not exactly that magical moment or sudden realization that I wanted for myself for so long, but I can attest that the steps work and Rachel and Jim’s advice is solid. It has taken me fifteen years, but it’s solid.

What I haven’t figured out is how to stay engaged in the world of style and fashion. So much of style and fashion talk revolves around what’s new, what we’ve just bought, and what we’re going to buy next. I don’t know how to make sense of that anymore. I now get excited when I talk about things like a pair of 1940s military thermal underwear that I found at a flea market recently, but let’s face it, 80-year-old long johns are not style or fashion. (A curious artifact, yes, something for historians.) Fashion is always moving forward and I find myself wanting to look back. And it’s not just my interests that have shifted. When Jess Graves recently wrote that there are people who believe that places like Bergdorf’s shouldn’t exist, I saw myself in that. I am an anti-capitalist and fashion is a capitalist endeavor. Within the system of fashion, I am irrelevant, unnecessary and unwanted.

I still care about clothes, but the system is broken and I can’t quite find my place in it. I can’t take part in fashion and style specific social media anymore, I can’t subscribe to shopping newsletters, I can’t browse online stores or resale platforms, I can’t read trend reports. I’ve had to leave all of that behind because these outlets trigger me and my shopping addiction, and after an initial thrill they would take me back to that dark place I’ve tried to climb out of for the last fifteen years. I can only stay engaged with style content that’s humane and vulnerable. Everything else has had to go and it hasn’t been easy to quit, but the reward has been worth it. Not wanting to shop all the time is pretty awesome.

I feel that I’m on the cusp of moving from one discourse to another. For some time I considered myself a personal style writer, but at some point I began to identify more with the sustainable style discourse, which can be quite preachy (guilty as charged!), some of it veers on self-congratulatory (I’m trying really hard to avoid this), and it can get repetitive and depressing. How many different ways can we talk about buying less and the myriad problems within the fashion industry? One day I hope to find my place in the slow style discourse, where people talk and write about things like sewing, craft and history of clothes. I’m not much of a sewer or a crafter myself, but I look forward to connecting with people over 80-year-old long johns. I’d like to think that it’s possible.

I’ll conclude with an anecdote about shopping and wearing clothes. My husband Chris wears his clothes until they literally disintegrate. He simply buys what he loves and wears it to death. I asked him recently how he does that. He replied: “the trick is to not care about what anyone else thinks.” I’ll just leave you with that. It’s a lot more to unpack than you’d think.

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