I’m not much of an impulse shopper anymore. Things cost too much, I don’t have enough room in my closet for mistakes. Instead, I’m a big believer in the pat rationality of shopping carts and wishlists.
It’s not that I never find myself overtaken by the passion of a striking item; if I find something alluring enough, I throw distance between it and myself until reason closes the gap. Is this a sudden want or an unrealized need? Is this the most reasonable price? Will it assimilate into my life with ease?
There are a few ways to answer those questions. Most of them could be answered by me going to the store, no? No. I need more of a process, a way to perform penance for the wasteful sin of acquisition, a mountainous task to throw myself into when I need to procrastinate. What’s more complicated and ambiguous than an infinite scroll to analyze the words and photos of every online sales listing possible?
But while I familiarize myself with the objects of my desire, I nod into the ritual of my continued encounters with them. The gusset goes up to here, it will protect you. Conjuring scenarios. Answering questions.
But those are only two dimensions. If the thing is common enough, I have to hear its swoosh, watch it flap in the wind, see it run through the slush and muck. I have to visually pursue the kind of person who has what I’m looking for and see how it manifests in their vibe. I have to make sure it doesn’t actually look really silly in the real world. (Really specific Instagram hashtags can get close to this sometimes.)
As I told Tahirah Hairston when she kindly and thoughtfully interviewed me for Ridiculous Little Things, I’ve been reading The Fashioned Body. Joann Entwistle talks in a section on “Fashion and Authenticity” about the 19th-century roots of capital-r Romanticism and its investigation of and investment in the self. A stripe of Bourgeois English city dwellers were judging by appearances to try to get at the reality that was surely behind the facades everyone was putting up because the sudden proximity of so many people during rapid urbanization was so off-putting.
“In such a moral universe as this, dress and appearance are thought to reveal one’s ‘true’ identity.”
I walk past people with a part of themselves that I want for myself. I observe them and try to imagine what kind of self I could become if I harvest the right ideas from them.
Shit is fucked up right now! Gaza, Haiti, Congo, Sudan, Tigray, Floyd Bennett Field. When a lot of things are going wrong, it can sometimes feel like the only things I can fix are the parameters of a search. But that’s foolishness. You can walk past any Free Palestine protest and see that there are people who know they can do more than that. The specter of “geopolitical risk” doesn’t haunt the business world because “reawakened latent sympathy for the Palestine cause” leads to protests. It’s because of what might happen if protests aren’t enough.
There’s something so leeching about the whole exercise. But it helps me to know that what I want is what I want. For a while I was in the part of winter where I was wondering if I should finally get some Doc Martens or Solovairs as my winter boots. These are the outfits of people I saw around New York wearing Doc Martens.
Uptown Q train, 12.28.23
big baggy black soft synthetic pants with a radical cinch at the bottom and an inch of exposed black sock (black 1460 lows)
Outside the Paley Center, 1.31.24
wide-leg dusty rose corduroys in a medium wale (black 1460 highs)
Rockefeller Center, 1.31.24
lavender shirt dress flowing from beneath a near-shearling black bomber shell with humbly made edging (black 1460 platform highs)
47th-50th Streets/Rockefeller Center station, 1.31.24
black puffer with velvetty sheen, pink crochet headscarf with red hearts (black kiltie loafers)
Downtown B train, 1.31.24
black nylon Longchamp tote with black-surfaced bright green leather accents, black shearling bomber with black nap, oatmeal zipped-up turtleneck (black 1460 platform highs)
Broadway/Lafayette Street station, 1.31.24
wide-straight jeans in a worn blue wash with a perfect hem dusting the forefoot (black 1460 highs)
School dropoff, 2.2.24
double breasted black-buttoned teddy coat in the classic caramel (black 1460 platform highs)
Classon Avenue, 2.4.24
Thigh-length plaid puffer coat with tall collar, black windowpane, yellow centered highlights, red background (black knee-high lugged Chelsea)
Uptown B train, 2.8.24
thin-stripe navy-and-white shirt under navy sweater, brown leather A-2 bomber with back strap and pencil pocket on right sleeve and dye worn at the edges, thin brown belt with small round brass buckle, black nylon tote with cartridge-spaced stitching on straps and rub-raised quilting on body, true-blue Levi jeans with dye rubbed from the front of the thighs to the knee and small stitched-over patch on right shin and slight cuff with white selvedge exposed, white socks (oxblood kiltie loafers)
Classon Ave, 2.10.24
Red-and-white keffiyeh worn as a head wrap (color-shifting rainbow 1460 highs)
Tell me about your favorite trial of selection.