About ten years ago, after the dot-com bubble burst but before the big housing crisis, I was in Boston on business and decided to go around by foot and by Duck Boat, so as to see the sights. I also explored the buildings attached to the hotel the convention was in, and they really surprised me. Never before had I been surrounded by so much non-fake wealth while out in public.
I’ve always thought of wealth and luxury as things that ought not be flaunted. If they had to be displayed at all, I always assumed the appropriate place for it is behind closed doors, in a house with no street number, down a country road far away from public view. It wasn’t until I saw Boston that I understood the extent to which not everyone agrees with my way of doing things.
Until I experienced mall shopping in downtown Boston, I truly believed that the stories of American commercial excess were fiction, and that the products and lifestyles depicted on the screen were about as realistic as animated cartoons. Everywhere else I've been in the United States has always reinforced my impression of it as an empire in its twilight: full of places that might once have been great, but that are now extremely poor, depressed, and broken down. Nothing works, everything is worn out, and in general you can't expect to get what you pay for. Aside from a few elite gated communities, and perhaps the kind of invisible houses where I assumed all the art collections are being displayed, it’s always seemed to me that for the most part people are struggling to get by. Between the crumbling infrastructure and the general lack of a manufacturing or skilled trade base, the entire nation has struck me as running chiefly on hype. What’s marketable these days? Knowledge. Information. Process. Connections. Bandwidth. Attention. Nothing you can eat, wear, or sell later when you’re done using it, of course… but people sure want to hear about how they can securitize it and sell derivatives while outsourcing the actual work. There’s a lot of sizzle being sold, and people might pay more for the sizzle at first, but eventually they do expect something for their money, and you can’t eat sizzle. With the amount of sizzle being bought and paid for, relative to the amount of steak being actually delivered, I’d expect the American public in general to be thinner and angrier.
Ordinarily I’m not much of a mall person. So I looked very carefully as I stepped out of the hotel skywalk, to see whether I should go exploring.
The inside of the mall did not match my seven-year impression of the USA at all. There were no broken tiles, the place was immaculately clean, the walls were actually lined with marble, and on the whole it looked like what all the big, swanky casinos in Las Vegas try to be but aren’t. “Weird,” I thought to myself. The mall appeared to be completely free of touts and kiosks, and I noticed that Nike and Adidas were not battling for space in my field of view. So I decided to see if I could find what I needed, and perhaps have a Jane Goodall experience while getting a bit of exercise.
I passed store after store full of doodads I didn't need, didn't want, and couldn't possibly have used. The people were weird. Everything about how they dressed and moved was completely wrong. The women were clicking about in designer clothing carrying handbags that I thought (and wanted to believe) existed only on television: the kind with embossed logos and four to five figure price tags. They even wore them wrong. Instead of slinging the strap cross-body so that the purse can be properly defended, or putting an arm through the hand loops to make the purse harder to take, they let them dangle freely on a single shoulder strap. They wore heels too high to allow them to run or climb, and skirts too tight to permit them to execute a plausible kick. Their hands sported nails too long to allow them to actually make a fist. It’s as though nobody had ever shown them the rudiments of how to stay in one piece. Soft-handed men wore clear nail polish and shiny, oversized watches with second hands that didn’t twitch. Everyone walked about with one hand full of shopping bags and the other on a cellular phone. They walked around corners without first glancing to see who or what was there. It was the sort of scene that makes me consider whether I could conquer an entire city block with a butter knife, and whether it would be fun to try.
Now, I was in need of a winter coat and a couple of sweaters since I’d planned December travel even farther north. Due to the very warm winter climate in New Mexico, where I live, the items marketed as winter coats were not convincing. So, I found something resembling a department store and went into it. I’d heard of the store we Mustachians know as Needless Markup, and here was a specimen awaiting examination. So in I went.
The first thing I noticed about Needless Markup was the fact that every single garment had something wrong with it. Something had been done to make it less useful. For example, there were no turtlenecks in the store. All the turtleneck-style sweaters were strategically cut, slashed, buttoned, decorated, or otherwise made into look-at-me, look-at-me garments designed to be worn once or twice, remembered, and discarded in favor of another fad the following season.
Clothing shouldn’t be memorable, in my opinion. If I wanted to be memorable, I’d show up at a costume party dressed as Lady Godiva. Cheapest costume ever. Overall, I'd rather not be too memorable. Besides, if the idea is for people to notice what you’re wearing, aren’t you basically paying for the privilege of using your body to advertise someone else’s product, for the benefit of people whose opinions don’t matter? You might as well just spray paint a gigantic Nike swoosh on your forehead. If at some point someone offers to buy advertising space on my body, I may reconsider. But the offers haven’t exactly been pouring in.
I picked up one sweater and looked at it, wondering whether I could repair it to make it look like normal clothing, and wondering if there was something special about it to justify its more-than-$300 price tag. Was it made of angora? Silk? The pubic hair of a thousand tiny unicorns?
Sadly, a glance at the labels revealed that the garments on display were the same polyester crap being peddled everywhere else. Made in Bangladesh. Made in China. Made no doubt by forced labor from somebody else’s nine-year-old who should probably be in school. The only noticeable difference between a Needless Markup sweater and one from Costco is that a Costco sweater comes with a stealth mode. You can wear it, look good, and have people notice that you look good. But they notice *you* and not the garment you’re wearing. So there’s nothing to prevent you from wearing the same thing later in the week and making just as good of an impression. Needless Markup clothing has no stealth mode. It’s intended to be noticed, remarked on, and discussed. That makes it almost completely useless, to my way of thinking.
As I moved into the outerwear section, I noticed that there were more salesclerks than customers. The clerks cruised in lazy but predetermined patterns, and I fought back the urge to hum the theme from “Jaws” as one broke free of the school and swam in to acknowledge my existence. This one had an unusually symmetrical nose. “Can I help you?” She asked, glancing at my well-polished loafers that were on their second set of half-soles but that bore no obvious decoration, bling, or manufacturer indicator. Judging by her expression I couldn’t tell whether she’d sat on a ruler during her lunch break or if someone had chemically stapled her eyebrows to her skull.
“Possibly. I want to buy a new winter coat.”
“The newest thing this year is chinchilla. Do you like fur?” I noticed other salesclerks cruising by close enough to hover, but not close enough to affect a sale.
“It has its place,” I said, thinking of a cute violinist I’d been chasing for the past year. Mentally, I was thinking: chinchilla? The tiny, round squeaky creature that looks like the baby lemur in the Madagascar movies? Now, I’ve got no issue with the fur industry overall, but when I saw that nearly every jacket in the place was adorned with white, silky fur I decided to have some fun and recalled an old Blackadder scene.
“What a lovely cat skin collar.” I pretended to admire one of the coats, which was further decorated with a bunch of dangly little silver medallions.
“It’s chinchilla.” She insisted, starting to get huffy.
“Nonsense, it’s cat. See how soft it is?"
She proceeded to tell me what a chinchilla was; I smiled, nodded, and continued to refer to it as "cat".
"And it even has some of their little collars and name tags.” I turned over one of the medallions. “Fluffy.” I looked up to see the clerk turning purple.
“Are you going to buy anything at all?”
“Yes, but probably not here.”
“Why not?”
“Because every single thing in this store has been made ridiculous.” Not just the clothing, either.
“Then I’ve got to ask you to leave. Before I call security.”
I was thinking that I could probably drop whatever Paul Blart wandered onto the scene, but I allowed myself to be escorted out by the sales staff instead.