If you find yourself in a city with some free time, what do you gravitate to? Restaurants, museums, performances, opium dens, really anything is less shameful than admitting that you would go look at, maybe try on, maybe even purchase, some new outfits or accessories. What sort of a vapid, consumerist sheep would do that?
This sort.
I always need to be clear, when I say I like clothes-shopping, what I mean, since it summons an image of Carrie Bradshaw toppling over in her stilettos from the sheer weight of her shopping bags. That’s not me. I do not find it generically interesting to be in a store where clothes are sold. Most, high-end or low, are pretty awful, filled with items I can too easily imagine finding in my closet, thinking how did that get there, and bringing to a donation bin, or seeing at a thrift store and being like, yes, that is where that would end up.
No, what happens is more that I think of a particular garment—a sweatshirt I’ve seen on an old sitcom, a dress on a fellow neighborhood mother—and I must track down the perfect version of the item in question. It needs to be the right color, pattern, and material. When I was looking for a vintage 1990s floral dress I did not want a voluminous Elaine-from-“Seinfeld” dress, nor a prairie ankle-length trad-chic number, which eliminated many possibilities. It had to be cotton, not polyester. It can’t cost anything too ridiculous. It also needs to fit, and to fit the body I actually have, not some imaginary version of it that would emerge in an alternate universe where I went running more than once a month. There’s the hunt, then the fun of actually finding it. Two, in this case, as the photo will attest.
Meanwhile what do I actually wear? I think the fashion terminology for it is: crapola. I ordered a bunch of Hokusai wave t-shirts from Uniqlo shortly after my first child was born, and I like to pair those with a pair of Old Navy pajama bottoms I chose because they were all that was on offer in a petite length and all-cotton, but which turned out to be a dupe for the ones worn by a dying murderer on “Shetland.” I work from home, have small children, and… cannot attribute my shabbiness to either of these facts, as it predates both.
And I am not in fashion, as in, in the industry. An exception is made—or rather, ought to be made—for those in the business itself, designers or reporters. It’s one thing to care about clothes if it’s somehow your job. It absolves you of vanity or acquisitiveness.
Why, then, do I need, urgently, to track down a pair of baggy pleated khakis like the ones the Wall Street Journal of all places claims are the new trend in menswear? I have looked in person at used clothing stores, and online, on Etsy and at basically every shop where pants go for under $100, in the women’s section but also men’s and (5’2” privilege, sorry) kids, and found nothing. The quest continues, or will whenever time permits. What do I imagine these pants would add to my life?
Liking clothes-shopping is an embarrassing trait. It’s pathologized: this notion that you might think you enjoy it, but it’s that you’ve been brainwashed by consumerist society into thinking you need the latest thing. Self-deprecatory social media posts about shopping one’s way out of a slump regularly go viral. A Styles section article about fashion choices parents make at school drop-off presents itself as a confession, and how would it be otherwise? As Alyssa Shelasky notes in the piece, you’re not supposed to care.
Along with the pressure to spend money on clothes—pressure, that is, from advertising, but also from a society that frowns upon showing up for things that are ill-fitting, or with obvious signs of wear—is a counterpressure: Fast fashion, one is forever reminded, is killing the planet. Silicon Valley founders wear a uniform, a tidbit repeatedly shared as evidence that anyone with a brain would know better than to take pleasure from assembling a range outfits. To like shopping is to be, paradoxically, out of sync with fashion. Several zeitgeists behind.
I can make excuses. I can point to the Covid lockdowns—longer in Toronto than just about anywhere—and how incredible it is to me that I can once again physically go into a store. I can make it more personal still and attribute it to the fluctuating dimensions that come with giving birth to two children in less than three years. There’s the novelty of a non-spherical waistline, and, with childcare, of entering a shop alone, without a stroller.
And is it not (she says to herself, in circa-2009 feminist-blog voice) sexist to treat clothes-shopping as more frivolous than other pursuits? Or is it sexist that society asks women to shop? I’m losing track. The thing where women are both expected to look presentable and shamed for the effort they-slash-we spend on doing so has a whiff of misogyny about it, but it ranks low on even my own list of feminist concerns.
When I try to imagine myself in the place of someone who truly DGAF about clothes (and I suspect some who claim this are doing so performatively, and would secretly enjoy a trip to the Gap), I think of my own approach to gadgets. Whenever a device—phone, computer, whatever—becomes truly unusable and needs replacing, I find myself stalling, thinking how literally anything is a more exciting use of time or money, and quietly railing against a society set up to require use of electronics. I attempt to put myself into such a person’s mindset not as an experiment but because if I could, I’d switch something in my brain to be as indifferent to finding the perfect fall pants—on-trend perhaps, but they need to be actual vintage, none of this elastane or elastic-waistband newness—as I am to whatever Apple is currently marketing.
So I’ll have one tab open with tapered-chino research (only a fool would buy non-stretch corduroys without being able to try them on, right? Or maybe…), another with the latest New York Times “Ask Vanessa” column, or more specifically, with the comments. All 687 geniuses, who have, independently of one another, come to the conclusion that style matters more than trends, that it’s dumb to care what you wear, that “climate, famine, Ukraine etc” are more pressing than how to style voluminous trousers. (It’s a good point though. If I had these khakis, what on earth would I wear with them?)
I am in principle on the side of clothes-shopping’s defenders. Get over yourselves, you men (and fine, plenty of women) who are above caring about such tripe. You’re no better than those of us whose heads swivel at a vintage shop with a “sale” sign only to discover that the store in question has the pants you’re looking for, kind of, but they are, despite the whole vintage thing, an entire $120, which is numerous bridges too far. As interests go, it’s harmless enough, and the people who sneer at the interest are insufferable.
But there it was, in stark, unforgiving detail. This month’s credit card bill: a thousand dollars lower than the last, and by intent. While I do not spend a thousand dollars a month on clothes (and remember these are Canadian dollars, which are like normal dollars only smaller), and rather tried to be more sensible when it came to basically everything, this was clearly the discretionary thing to cut. I made a list of financial priorities, and once everything to do with the children (daycare!), the house, and the 11-year-old dog is taken into account, the non-essential Katherine Hepburn slacks budget is approximately negative fifty cents.
As a man with similar proclivities, I pass no judgment.
Great essay, took me a minute to realize it wasn’t by Freddie - I was like oh I didn’t know Freddie is looking for the perfect fitting floral dress…