The unspecific desire of buying things
As the world feels apocalyptic, this quiet pursuit has become a heavenly escape.
I can remember when it began for me. It was March, and they were a pair of trousers from Scanlan Theodore. Expensive but justifiable under the guise of ‘breakup pants’. An exception to the rule, I proclaimed, until I bought another pair in June. I had momentarily gone backwards in the grieving process and Scanlan Theodore had released them in a new colour. It was a sign, I thought, but many more signs have arisen since then. There is an invisible urge I have felt this year that hasn’t just led to new trousers. There have been new jeans and new trench coats and new shirts and new shoes. The most obvious reason behind this relentless purchasing is that I am not paying rent for the first time in a decade. Yet this spending feels more emotional than practical.
In a recent essay for Harper’s BAZAAR, the American playwright Jeremy O. Harris wrote that clothes are the ultimate performance of self-expression. As a young queer, black boy growing up in the South, he would spend hours in front of the mirror in his mother’s room trying on new clothes and creating different combinations. He would slip into his mother’s skirts and slide red lipstick across his lips. He would attend church wearing a light-blue bow tie and a navy blue suit. “The Sunday-school heretic with baby GQ style,” he wrote. “For how else would I have stood out without clothes that helped me perform my difference and uniqueness?” When sweatpants dominated Instagram feeds in 2020, Harris instead found himself draped on his couch in “red-carpet finery” as he streamed Madoka Magica and The Queen’s Gambit. As he wrote, “The idea of not reaching for the heavens while trapped in the hell of my apartment was unthinkable.”
It is for this same reason that I have found myself curating my wardrobe and building upon it. As the world continues to feel apocalyptic, this quiet pursuit has become nothing but a heavenly escape. My wardrobe is also one of the only parts of my world I can use as an outlet to express my identity in a more visible, specific way. At the moment, I don’t have an apartment to redecorate or a city to call home. So I have found home in my wardrobe and, perhaps, the reinvention of it. But when does self-expression turn into overconsumption? When does reinvention become a social reflex in a capitalistic world?
In Having and Being Had, a book interrogating society’s relationship with work, leisure and capitalism, Eula Biss conducts a searingly honest self-audit of the value system she has bought into. ‘Consume’, she notes, is derived from the Latin word ‘Consumere’ which means “to seize or take over completely”. We can consume food but we can also be consumed by rage. Consumption was once the name for a wasting disease and in its early days it implied destruction. Yet, today, Biss notes, it is a word used to describe everything we do outside of work. When we’re eating or shopping or watching TV or reading books or listening to music, we’re consuming.
The author, who recently bought a new home, writes about the “strange unspecific desire” she feels when she walks into a furniture store. She wants everything and nothing. If she buys something, it delivers a sense of accomplishment, but this only lasts until dinner. She quotes Lewis Hyde, who writes in The Gift, “The desire to consume is a kind of lust. But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it.” It is this inability in the things we buy to completely satiate this lust that has us caught in a perpetual loop of consumption. But this desire to consume is also something we use to fill another hole in our lives.
In My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries, Elizabeth Chin writes that “people are so completely and so powerfully alienated that they are reduced to things; in the meantime, the things they produce and the things they purchase have acquired all the livingness that people have lost.” That line reads like it was written for the pandemic era. We’ve been deprived of experiences, we’ve been deprived of each other. And as we’ve lost our own livingness, we have given more life to the things we own or the things we want to own. “One of the main things Marx noticed about capitalism,” Chin writes, “is that it really encourages people to have relationships with things instead of with other people.”
When it became apparent that Sydney’s lockdown wasn’t ending anytime soon, my friend messaged to say she would see me in 2022 when I owned seven pairs of Scanlan Theodore pants. It was a joke, but there was also a little truth in it. In these times, that feel both uncertain and stagnant, curating a wardrobe or redecorating an apartment isn’t just fulfilling an “unspecific desire” usually designated to consumption. The action or the pursuit is giving us a sense of control and the illusion of growth; we are still moving forward in some small way. “Pinterest is giving me life in lockdown,” this same friend wrote to me some weeks later. “I have found all the outfits I want and also planned my home.” Even if this pursuit of self-expression is giving more livingness to the things we own or want to own, there seems to be a tiny part of it that is useful. Reinvention can be act of survival and a strange sign of hope.
In the last few pages of Having and Being Had, Eula Biss wrote about her neighbour, who said that time and money is how you know what matters to a person. This neighbour spent her time and money attending plays and concerts. She invested in the arts. Historically, consumption implied destruction but, as Biss notes, not everything we consume today is destroyed. “Music becomes part of us, as food does, but it’s not destroyed in the process,” she writes. I haven’t just bought clothes this year, but books and records and more books. Things that have become a part of me and changed me on the inside. And when it comes to navigating our relationship with consumption, perhaps there is something in that. If we can get better at identifying when we are buying something because it will become a part of us versus when it will temporarily satiate an unspecific desire, if we can get better at knowing the difference between temporary and enduring, we will consume better. Two weeks ago, Scanlan Theodore emailed to inform me that my favourite trousers were back in stock. I was consumed by an initial thrill when the email arrived, but it only lasted until dinner. I haven’t bought a third pair yet.
Related (and unrelated) recommendations:
I’ve recently read and loved The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood and Weather by Jenny Offill, which are both - in their own ways - an exploration of love and existential despair. Depending on your own state of mind, this makes them completely suitable or unsuitable for this moment.
Obviously, Having and Being Had by Eula Biss. It is one of the most enjoyable non-fiction reads I have consumed over the last few years. Biss has a unique ability to communicate concisely and entertain all at once.
I attempted to make sense of Kanye West’s new album, DONDA, for GQ Australia this week. I am still an atheist, but the album is quite good.
Speaking of GQ, this profile on Jonah Hill being SuperGood is also SuperGood and (if you missed it) I recommend you read it. It’s nice to read something joyful and delicious right now. His outfits in the shoot are also excellent.
This interview with the author Sally Rooney on the perils of fame and her new book is very good.
If you’re a ‘Succession’ fan, you will know season three is coming out soon. I have two pieces for you. This New Yorker piece on the show’s creator, which is kind of part profile, part review. Then, there’s this excellent Vulture feature from the writer Hunter Harris who spent two weeks with the cast in Tuscany.
This profile on Naomi Campbell for The Cut’s latest cover is excellent.
Finally, because I have been in Kanye Land for the last few days, I would like to recommend this old feature exploring the end of his relationship with Kim Kardashian West and these four songs from his album: ‘Pure Souls’, ‘Heaven and Hell’, ‘Believe What I Say’, and ‘Jesus Lord’.
That is all. See you next month.
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