Sunday, June 27, 2010

I Hoard Sorrow: Musing on the Cupidity of Consumption or In Defense of Working Class Shame

It all began with these Yves Saint Laurent shoes from Tom Ford's final season with the fashion house. The crystal encrusted cherries, the Lucite heel with gold glitter and rhinestones entombed within it's form, and the ruby red velvet that I imagined would feel like a lover's tongue lapping on my tootsies. That's really only half the truth.

Yes those were the reasons I told myself that I HAD to acquire these heels regardless of the fact that I had to eat off of Wendy's 99 cent menu nearly every night from the expense that came with living in Southern California. The real reason I so desperately wanted these to adorn my feet was that I wanted the women who treated me with the disdain of an S.S. Guard doing overtime in Dachau to say to themselves, "Wait a second! How did she get the editorial dream shoes? I'm going to have to treat her with less contempt now since she actually can afford Yves Saint Laurent".

Afford being the operative word. I couldn't afford these shoes. Instead it began a cycle of being able to use a department store card in order to continue to compete with women who I wouldn't have saved if they were on the Titanic. If you knew me personally you might ask, "But were'nt you also in the Communist Youth League during this time?" well....YES, but that the same working class pride that my mother had inspired me with during my childhood, even my fervent beliefs in Papa Stalin wouldn't quell the reality of being treated badly for being poor.
The next completely ridiculous "must have" item came from Stefano Pilati's first collection for, you guessed it, Yves Saint Laurent. The dress ended up on Ebay a few years after the famed Spring 2005 Ready-To-Wear show and I was convinced that if I just HAD this dress that my entire life would stop spiraling into a pool of sadness. For real. In my mind the beauty of this hot pink concoction would somehow envelope over me and I would no longer be a short, goat-herding calves, pinch more than an inch nose, girl who was still pouting about college being a "ruse". The truth?

I've never even worn this dress. Every time that it MAY have been appropriate there was always something newer and better that I had to have...the void remained unfilled and the debt continued to accumulate. There was also an incredible fear attached to the potential for "ruining" this dress if it actually ever made it off the black velvet hanger. A complete contradiction of care vs. absurdity and distorted thinking, because we all know the vision that I had as a female, and the last time I checked dresses don't make you grow 7 inches when you put them on.
The Miu Miu Baroque Wedges from Fall 2006. When I went to go pick these up from Neiman's (put on the card so therefore the smoke and mirrors act of purchasing was justified) I was ecstatic after having been told by my "Shoe Guy" (i.e. DEALER) that I had scored the only size 35's in the entire company. The words, my friends, were magic. Delightful, glorious and competitive words that made me prance around thinking that no one else with size 35 feet would be able to get these hand-carved testaments to gaudy excess. The sense of power, albeit buying power, cascaded over my 4' 11" frame. A member of Chicago's noise scene had accompanied me that day and sat in the over-stuffed chairs eyeing me as if I was a high-heeled tank crushing the bodies and spirits of Tiananmen Square.
Carolina Herrera's "Swimmers" dress remains one of my most preposterous Ebay purchases. The dress is a gorgeous silhouette featuring women of color diving into the luminosity of the azure fabric and is perhaps one of the most unique uses of the novelty print in the past decade. While those previous statements are an accurate description of said dress there's a just a small catch. You're a dress with black women on it! This is a difficult dress to wear, let's just be HONEST, we're all adults...I don't need to explain institutionalized racism to you.

As a white girl parading around in Ms. Herrera's creation the novelty of the novelty print elicits a different response depending on the amount of gentrification that Chicago neighborhoods have gone through, and let me just tell you the ONE time I've ever worn this dress I got a good taste of how people feel in Avondale, Logan Square, Wicker Park, Ukrainian Village, and Lakeview.
Would someone respond differently if the dress was worn by an African-American woman? Well...DUH. Does the dress make other people uncomfortable or does it merely make me self-conscious? All I know is that I truly love this dress, but the reality of what seems like an appropriated image seems too colonizer for me. That's just being honest.

The final pièce de résistance of my financial Trail of Tears are the Christian Louboutin "Mondrian" wedges that were, once again, the ONLY ones that Neimans bought in my size. Serotonin and endorphines gang-banged my brain.
It seemed to make perfect sense to me because they were the most outrageous shoes in the entire collection, they were literally "museum worthy", and evoked the approval of Cynthia Rowley during a store event. I was hooked! These were the greatest shoes in the universe.

Unfortunately these shoes go with nothing. A reader can correctly assume from the myriad of images above that basic black is not a part of my wardrobe and instead I gravitate towards items that can only be loved and appreciated by fellow magpies. What was I thinking? I wasn't thinking! I was feeling and clearly I was feeling like masquerading around in material items that I loved for their beauty, but also was driven to drape myself in order to garner compliments from people whose opinions shouldn't have mattered to me anyway.
The title of the post comes from the Red Eye cable show where the commentators went open season on Lindsay Lohan's infamous Insider interview whereby the Red Eye crew refers to her as being a celebrity "whore-der". The clip can be viewed here and is indisputably hilarious in mocking the troubled Lohan as both a tragedy and a farce. The statement, "I hoard sorrow" is what really articulated the underlying nature of people irrationally consuming these endless items while tap-dancing around our own uncertain financial and emotional futures.
Unless you're Fred Astaire tap-dancing just sort of makes you into a minstrel show.

This post was directly inspired by the blog Godammit, I'm Mad! and even more due to Sister Wolf's latest posting called "Because I'm Stupid" in which she describes the condition that so many of us find ourselves in, questioning our purchases and our state of mind. In the comment section the very same statements echoed from others coming forward with the world in which we all play dress up in our minds...carefully clothing our idealized selves in the Emperor's New Clothes.

All of this being said I know exactly why I continue to make the financial decisions of a three year old because I'm still playing paper dolls and imagining a world where I'm not being taunted for having "elf booties" from Payless. No recovered memories are needed here! Thank you mean middle-class white girls!

There is also the undeniable appreciation for beauty, quality, and rarity that comes from being raised to admire these works of art from afar, but the pain of the compulsion and the obsessive fetishism at some point becomes the leaded shoes upon which we drown.

3 comments:

Sister Wolf said...

Fuck those Mean girls!They were morons then and they're morons now. We just need a mantra, like "stop the insanity!"

Carly Findlay said...

This is a fantastic post about the reality of how shopping can make people obsess over the need to have and hoard and seek approval.
I like this paragraph:
'Unfortunately these shoes go with nothing. A reader can correctly assume from the myriad of images above that basic black is not a part of my wardrobe and instead I gravitate towards items that can only be loved and appreciated by fellow magpies. What was I thinking? I wasn't thinking! I was feeling and clearly I was feeling like masquerading around in material items that I loved for their beauty, but also was driven to drape myself in order to garner compliments from people whose opinions shouldn't have mattered to me anyway.'
You are a great writer :) Thank you for sharing your experience.

etoilee8 said...

Those shoe salesmen at Neimans know how to feed off your weakness. Believe me, they've done it to me before too. Granted, I do love and wear my Chanel sandals regularly but the guy sure did lay it on thick when he kept saying "these are the only 41s left in the company . . . "