I’ve been spending more than usual lately. Already I feel the impulse to excuse my purchases with explanations of which things were greatly marked down or presents for others or bought secondhand on a cheapo spree – I shall conclude by saying that recently a well-meaning person who doesn’t know me that well tried to pawn off on me a book painfully entitled Women Who Shop Too Much. (Yikes.) I’m not in financial trouble at all, and to be honest, I don’t even think I’m spending beyond my means, but the conclusion remains that in my little sticky note of Things I Bought This Month, the column of purchases is longer than it usually is.
The first reason that came to mind was stress. Once the rent and bills were paid, and once a little was socked away in savings, the rest of my paycheck often seemed ripe for the spending on whatever would make me feel good at the time. Retail therapy — easy enough.
But there’s something else. I hadn’t thought of it until I started germinating the idea for this post, but around two or three months ago, I also started to feel like I was growing out of my old wardrobe. Not only were things no longer fitting me right (ranging from size 2 to XL), but they no longer fit the image I had of myself, or the image I wanted to have of myself. And rather than slowly transitioning out of my old wardrobe, I felt rushed to hurry out of it. I sold a ton of clothes and put a bunch away for sentimental reasons. I pared down my closet to what I felt I really valued. I went on a Salvation Army spree with one of my closest friends, sniffed around on eBay for hours, and window-shopped on the Internet.
It was around this time (or perhaps simultaneous to this time) that I started becoming earnest about fashion. I’d cared about clothes before, but in a very casual, hodge-podge kind of way. Prior to a few months ago, when I read fashion magazines (mostly Nylon and Vogue, although when I lived in New Haven I bought all manner of expensive international fashion magazines), I never paid attention to the specific designers. I didn’t read fashion blogs. I bought vintage clothing, but didn’t look closely at quality. So if I ever sound truly naïve in this blog, it’s because of this – I really am just starting out.
Often I’ll find myself on a blog or messageboard and some troll will pop up and deem all the readers superficial, rich, greedy, vain, spoiled children who don’t give a whit about the war in Iraq or starving children in fill-in-the-blank. I don’t feel the need to defend myself or other fashion bloggers against such claims; yes, a lot of us care about sample sales and the new Go! collections, but we are also smart people who care about a myriad of other things that have nothing to do with fashion.
What I worry about, for myself, is the very core of the argument: fashion is superficial. In that, fashion is, on the definition, on the surface. It is what I clothe myself in. I spend money on garments that are taken off in the end. I now spend a lot of time thinking about sweaters and the colors I will put on my body when I could be, say, memorizing a poem. Are they equivalent? Is the art of consuming and enjoying fashion the same thing as enjoying and consuming a poem?
Bear with me while I spin off into a slightly different direction. Sometimes I have a miniature crisis about my standing as a person who writes – no, not the fact that I haven’t published anything in years, or the rejection letters I’ve gotten from MFA programs over the last month, but the actual act of writing. When I’m in a bad mood, a self-absorbed, self-flagellating bad mood, it seems almost embarrassing to me that I should be trying to foist my creations on the world. Sometimes I feel like I should be doing something more useful. Chris is the one who argues with me when I’m feeling like this. This, he says, is where Communism comes from. (He’s no McCarthy, but he gets very defensive about literature.) We need art, he says. It’s not all steel mills and blacksmiths. We need art.
And that’s where I’m going with this, I guess. When dressing up is fun, when it’s silly and interesting and creative and reminiscent and forward-thinking, it might just be a kind of art.
If it leaves a bad taste in your mouth to think of consumerism as a form of art, well, you’re not alone. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. As much as we buy secondhand and make our own clothes, it’s probably the monks and nuns who fare best in this regard.
