Shopping Used to be a Language of Love…Now, It’s Disappearing

“Okay, but why bags?”

You know when you’re on the phone with someone but aren’t present? 

As a former customer service rep (okay, telemarketer), I like to think that I’ve perfected the art of convincingly yabbering away into the disintegrating mouthpiece of my wired EarPods, whatever insipid insurance scheme needed selling, even as my brain remained fully occupied elsewhere.

Yet, that question my friend posited on a call the other day sent me on a tailspin. And he could immediately tell I hadn’t been listening – there I was, frantically scrambling to come up with an answer to something that shouldn’t be so deep. Best I could manage in the end was a guilty “huh?”

Because what is it really about purses? 

It’s not like I haven’t had hyperfixations over the years (*coughs,* jeans). I loved red, loathed green, and ascribed resolutely to the school of belief that Supreme is just a sly marketing ploy (I still do). Heck, there’s probably a pair of pleather riding boots that’ll continue to rot in a landfill somewhere for another eight hundred years owing to an impulsive purchase I made upon my first encounter with The Devil Wears Prada (in my defense, I did wear them a lot more times than Andy does in the film, i.e., more than once).

Yet, how is it that my obsession with handbags endures? 

Is it because its one-size-fits-all fit is more forgiving to the fit-averse, like yours truly? Or was its loud logos and labels a liberating proclamation from my otherwise middle-class middlings? After all, here was something that blended brand, utility, and accessory onto prime outfit real estate – the arm. They’re called arm-candy for a reason, you know. 

And just like candy, they’re endlessly shoppable too, 

The Community of Consumption

“You know that look in someone’s eyes,” writes Rachel Christine of the Substack, Re:Culture, “the look of someone who loves you deeply and is trying to be supportive, but also is on the verge of losing their mind?”

That’s the look I have on as my mom proceeds to ask for the seventeenth time, “Do these baggy jeans actually look good on me?” As a staunch, swearing-by-the-skinny elder millennial, she probably will end up switching soon after to one of her more hip-hugging variants when I’m looking the other way.

I continue rallying for the roomier alternative nonetheless.

Over the years, I’ve had thousands, if not tens of thousands, of similar exchanges (some more successful than others)—with parents, peers, co-workers, and even total strangers on the internet—proudly brandishing a new acquisition, seeking recommendations prior to an important purchase, or simply dressing up ahead of an event that warrants an outfit. 

It’s always been a way of connecting for me, a love language, if you will.

But when selling yourself as an expert (or at least, someone with an “interest” in fashion), a sense of style becomes less of a luxury and more of an imperative. And growing up overweight and conventionally unattractive (a fairly generous read) in a world where Karl Lagerfeld was resorting to drastic measures to drop 90 pounds and fit into Hedi Slimane’s slinky Dior Homme suits, the idea that style should – or could – be effortless felt unfathomable.

So, while fashion was how I cared for – and communicated with – the world around me, shopping for myself was a masochistic exercise involving extensive sifting and sorting through discounted mall racks to find anything that fit. And bags, as it turned out, were the anomaly: uncritical of my outsized frame, unfazed by my too-big feet, and unprejudiced by my too-dark skin. Here was something that, for the first time, felt like self-love. 

Of course, I was hooked. Who wouldn’t be?

The Therapy of Retail

“And what a relief!” exclaims comedian Delaney Rowe. “When the worst possible outcome is true, it’s liberating. The same way you faintly wish that upon whipping open your shower curtain in the middle of the night out of paranoia, there will be, finally, a masked intruder eagerly waiting to murder you, making all that paralyzing fear worth it.”

You see, the upside of hitting the rock bottom of self-esteem growing up is that eventually, there’s no way to go but up. This can be a freeing notion. The downside, however, is that you try to squeeze yourself into increasingly undersized, circulation-cutting skinny jeans that once felt out of reach during those formative years.

And it is thus, about five years after Raf Simons first sent his models down the runway in oversized bubble parkas, moth-eaten tennis sweaters, and loose, louchely draped denim, that I succumbed to the millennial skinny agenda. 

In fact, it seemed that the more weight I lost, the bigger the prerogative was to show off my newfound weightlessness, and hence, the tighter the clothes became. It was as if every inch lost was a battle won—and each battle reaped its rewards—rewards that, with the post-pandemic boom in online shopping, came quick and easy. I came, I shopped, I conquered!

Bags remained in staple rotation—my beloved PS1 in that brilliant caramel tone (that I schlep religiously to date), the Bal Work fit for the arms of the emo Tumblr Olsen-superfan with My Chemical Romance on repeat, and a navy AllSaints tote with leather so smooth you can fry an egg on it.

But to add to that, there were clothes—the tighter, the better. Like clockwork, every morning, I was on eBay, sorting through the alerts that had accumulated overnight. Between lunch, I was peeping at Vinted, Depop, and Facebook Marketplace.

On the way back home, I stopped by to check on the curbside storekeepers, all of whom had soon come to know me by name.

If I’d previously lacked self-love, now I definitely had too much of it.

The Death Knell of Love

In some ways, this post-pandemic shopping frenzy culminated in the Montréal-based SSENSE’s decision to seek bankruptcy protection last month.

Having begun as an underground, alternative shopping destination with everything from hot indie names like Casey Casey and Juun.j, to discounted Dior, off-priced Gucci, and even Juicy Couture (once upon a time), by the end, SSENSE was reduced to yet another discount-happy e-tailer. 

And riding atop this wave of online shoppers came the authenticity discourse. Are you nineties? Tailored? Sporty? Minimalist? Elevated? Classic? The pursuit of personal style was distilled down to search-optimized catchphrases; you can wear unique things… but don’t forget to share their SKUs!

“I’ve always said that online shopping is to pornography what in-person shopping is to sex,” writes Liana Satenstein. “Yes, you’ll get your dopamine hit when you autofill your shipping address. Sure, tracking the status of your shipment can be vaguely titillating. You might even get an orgasmic rush when you see the FedEx guy pulling up. And then? Nothing. Shopping for even the rarest of Jean Paul Gaultier meshes has become akin to scarfing down a Big Mac.”

At the end of the day, we’re all shopping, shipping, and consuming the same things—how can we expect to look any different?

Somewhere along the way, it seems, we’ve conflated personhood with personal style. And now, we need every aspect of our lives to show it – our outfits, homes, Goodreads and Letterboxd accounts, right down to the charms on our handbags. Shopping, once the ultimate act of love, is now performative, much like most other acts of love these days. And that’s scary. 

But the good news is, it needn’t be. 

At the end of the day, shopping can occur within the confines of your closet. And as I threw one shirt atop another this morning in an attempt to break out from the monotony – à la Madame Miuccia – and a pair of bootcut black denim, Almost Famous-style, I realized: yes, I too am part of the overconsumption problem.

But maybe it’s not too late, just yet.