Peak shopping season is upon us. And so what? Shopping has become a drag. A bore. An obligation. A thing you do alone on your phone, not out in the world, which is where you want to be in your new Christmas coat, making a grand entrance … somewhere.
I am someone who has always enjoyed shopping. To be clear, I’ve never been a shopaholic who thrilled over the sheer size of a haul, nor have I ever enjoyed trudging through a dusty thrift store on a treasure hunt. I like the tactile pleasures of fingering fine fabric. I enjoy imagining myself looking soignée when all I’m doing is walking the dog. I love a purchase that, whenever worn, takes me back to a time and place in my own life story.
The first season I went to Paris to report on the seasonal fashion shows, my hotel was situated near a fancy boutique with a wonderfully distracting window display. Each time I passed by, I peered through the glass at a pale pink blouse covered in pleats. The shirt charmed me: its soft color, the delicate pleats, its aura of specialness.
I decided I would buy it to commemorate my first working trip to Paris. I was a novice to fashion, but I knew it would be expensive. I talked myself into a $500 commitment. This was around 1992, and that was more than I’d ever spent on anything. I looked at that blouse every day, but I didn’t go into the store until the last day of the shows. I was ready for my reward.
Well, that blouse was more than $1,000. In my innocence, I was stunned that any garment could cost so much. I was shocked by how much I still wanted it. And I was proud of myself for not going into debt to buy it.
Shopping, for me, isn’t just a matter of buying. It’s about discovery, memory and learning about who you are and who you want to be. And I wanted to be a person with rigorous focus, discerning taste and self-control.
I haven’t had a moment like that in a long time. Shopping should be about lust. Instead, shopping has become a slog. How did this happen? I don’t think it’s just me. I should still love to shop, yet I don’t. I don’t think anybody does, at least not the way we once did. And I have a theory as to why: In a world of abundant choice but imprisoning algorithms, it too often feels as though there’s nothing interesting to buy. Our senses are flattened, our appetites dulled. Nothing seems quite right.
Where is the self-discovery in regurgitating a runway look or replicating a TikTok fad? Shopping for clothes, shoes, a little fillip to brighten these dark days has become a bit like consuming champagne that’s gone flat. The connoisseurship, the sense of inspiration, serendipity and wonder, have mostly faded away.
Remember window shopping? That meandering outing was a reminder that shopping could be much more than a simple transaction. It could be an invitation to daydream. It was leisure time that didn’t involve a screen. It fired up your imagination. When you window shopped, you didn’t try on clothes. You didn’t look at price tags. Buying was optional. It is an entirely distinct activity from filling up a cart online and then coming to your senses and closing the tab.
Today, shopping has become pure transaction — the faster, the better.
As a child growing up in Detroit, shopping was defined by J.L. Hudson’s department store. It was one of those grand, old wonderlands with restaurants, elevator operators and sales clerks steeped in knowledge. I would go with my mother — a special outing of just us girls where I listened to her talk about how it made no sense to buy “chintzy” clothing. Buy things that last, she’d say. And then we’d head to the in-store ice cream parlor and I’d be rewarded with a scoop of vanilla for my patience as she’d shopped. Hudson’s meant being grown-up.
In college on the East Coast I went to Bamberger’s, where I bought a chocolate brown corduroy skirt that I wore with a vintage army jacket — a combination that made me feel cooler than my Midwestern roots. In Manhattan I was a Barneys New York shopper, and I loved it when I could say I had a regular salesperson, someone who recognized me whenever I came in and called me by name. She made shopping feel intimate.
Now Hudson’s is just another ghost brand, alongside Marshall Field’s, Hecht’s, Barneys and Bamberger’s. With their disappearance came the loss of geographic specificity, history and community. Malls started vanishing, too. The survivors are increasingly the class-A malls, as they’re called in commercial real estate, deluxe cookie-cutter complexes full of the same brands — Gucci, Prada, Apple — you might find in Las Vegas or at an airport. They reflect the consolidation of retailers and merchandising by spreadsheet, but also the stratification of income in this country. There seems to be little between the class-A malls and the Walmarts, other than a reminder of the hollowing out of the middle class.
At the same time, fashion retail became more corporate. It focused on growth and expansion because it had shareholders to consider. Department stores began a downward spiral of closures, cutbacks and discounts, along with timidness. Fashion brands big and small focused on opening their own stores, ostensibly so that they could give shoppers a more detailed idea of the stylistic world they envisioned. But it also meant that brands became more siloed. Saint Laurent stuck with Saint Laurent. Michael Kors hung with Michael Kors. Zara was with Zara. That doesn’t educate customers. It doesn’t help them put together their own personal stories. It just gives them looks to mimic.
Shopping was once a feast of possibilities and has instead become a test of patience. Line up for a limited edition sneaker drop. Camp out to get into a pop-up shop. Designer boutiques force would-be customers to queue up outside and wait for the privilege of entering. Ostensibly a security measure in the face of smash-and-grab robberies, the practice removes the joy of serendipity from all but the most dedicated line sitter, who probably knows exactly what she wants already. Browsers, dreamers and aspirants are corralled like crime suspects in a dystopian present. The cost of a famous-name handbag is astronomical already; now brands are adding surcharges that impulse shoppers must pay with the most valuable commodity of all: time.
But not all fashion is expensive. It’s also become very, very cheap. Not merely affordable — that would assure that a person of modest means has access to well-made, stylish clothing, a proposition that might reasonably translate into a single new outfit to start each season with a refreshed sense of self. Everyone should be able to participate in the pleasures of fashion. But dresses for $12? Those low, low prices have given people the ability to gorge, the belief that they, in fact, should gorge.
Shopping has become a grotesquerie of commodified consumerism and environmental waste. We feel guilty for participating in an exploitative system. But even when we are being judicious, even when we have dutifully examined the political and social implications of every prospective purchase, something is still off.
Taste is the fizz that’s missing. Because emulation is not taste.
Having taste isn’t about money or social standing or even access. “It has to be about desire,” my friend the retailer Nancy Pearlstein told me. I met Ms. Pearlstein in 1996, when she opened Relish, a women’s clothing boutique in Washington. She came from a formidable retail pedigree. Her father was Murray Pearlstein, who’d transformed the family business, Louis Boston, into a respected fashion institution.
Taste is a subjective notion, and Ms. Pearlstein isn’t arguing for any single aesthetic, much less a particular brand. But taste must be honed. It’s a practice.
“Most people don’t put a lot of emphasis on taste,” Ms. Pearlstein said. “I don’t think there’s an emphasis here in the United States to work that muscle. I don’t think that people put any credence in it. It’s almost superficial to be like that. Whereas in Europe, they have a different sensibility about that. They put importance in that. It’s pleasurable.”
“They want to understand it,” Ms. Pearlstein added. “They want to develop it.”
Ms. Pearlstein told me that she decided to retire at the end of the year, entrusting the store to a longtime employee. It was time, she said, for the next generation to have its say. But she is bullish on person-to-person retail and specialty stores: “There is some sense of direction and taste and editing.”
The best clothing stores are full of quirks, personal passions and silly asides. Dover Street Market is a revolving circus of rising brands. In Milan, 10 Corso Como is full of surprising collaborations. These shops are trustworthy — you’re in good hands, human hands, not the care of some algorithm. Ms. Pearlstein doesn’t hesitate to tell a customer when not to buy something. And customers need taste — or at least they need a desire to develop it.
“Taste should be something learned throughout your life,” notes Ms. Pearlstein.
Today, too many people are so interested in owning the on-trend thing that they haven’t taken the time to figure out what that thing says about who they are, what they believe and how they move through the world or why it’s popular in the first place. Shopping has become fraught with self-judgment. It’s a vice from which more and more people now seek to abstain — a form of gluttony that thrives on social media.
It’s just not fun. And more than anything, that’s what it should be. Not a test of endurance. Not a blow to self-esteem, already precarious finances or the environment. Shopping should be an opportunity to explore, to experiment, to create yourself.
Once it seemed that working out your taste muscle was part of growing up and defining yourself. But over time, the desire to look good, the willingness to care about appearance, to be fashionable, became taboo for a large swath of the population, Ms. Pearlstein said. The people who cared about aesthetics cared deeply. Everyone else? They lost their appetite to be discerning. A sameness descended. It didn’t happen abruptly, as if we stepped off a cliff into an abyss of blah. It happened incrementally.
Retailers became more corporate and mimed soliloquies on status and trends. Shoppers’ aesthetic discernment grew weak and flabby. A once lively conversation between sellers and buyers quieted. Shopping lost its fizz.
But I haven’t given up. I’m still on a journey to being a fully, stylistically self-actualized version of myself. I came a little closer one day when I walked into Ms. Pearlstein’s shop looking for a reliable black wool coat and emerged with a black leather bomber jacket by Sacai with a navy shearling collar because she casually, coyly showed it to me, knowing that it would make me happy. Instead of insisting on being pragmatic, I allowed myself to be happy. And each time I wear that coat, I don’t just feel joy; I feel entitled to joy. That’s what we need still. I hope we can get it back.
Robin Givhan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic and a former senior critic at large for The Washington Post.
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