I’ve loved beautiful, and often expensive, clothes since I was a teenager, well before my aesthetic had coalesced (plaid men’s trousers and J.Crew broadcloth coats? Sure, 16-year-old me). I loved them the year after I graduated from college, when I worked a minimum-wage job at a parking lot in Portland. I’d go finger the silky dresses at Frances May on my lunch break, and eventually the gentle-eyed owner sold me a sun-stained frock that had been hanging in the window for 70 percent off. I still wear it.
I loved clothes through the post-2008 recession era, when I was in graduate school in New York and discovered sample sales. I’d gleefully dig through the waist-high piles of Demylee sweaters and silk Tucker party dresses and Rachel Comey clogs and Ilana Kohn jumpsuits, swimming in the smorgasbord of cut-rate indie designer goods available everywhere in the city in those grim days. (I was vaguely aware that all these beautiful clothes piled in dusty warehouses represented the disintegration of the economy, but I was too blinded by desire to understand that small businesses, garment workers, and retailers were paying the price). These clothes mostly sat in my closet while I was getting my PhD because acids that splashed all over everything my lab coat didn’t protect.
There was a very particular feeling of accomplishment that coursed through me the moment I bought a beautiful thing, a feeling in short supply in my high-pressure, competitive science graduate program. I found this perfect item in the vast sea of the city, I’d think. I didn’t do my chemistry right today, or I did a bad job explaining that calculus concept to my student, but at the very least I could find the most exquisite version of a thing I’d been looking for. That lacy lingerie set from Journelle, bought after I’d made almost enough money tutoring to cover the price? I could wear that, hidden under my clothes, in the lab, and maybe it would give me the hit of adrenalin I’d need to finish that experiment I’d been delaying.
I grew up in a family that always had enough, and I got myself to adulthood with only the sketchiest sense of how money really worked. Throughout most of my years of loving clothes, I kept my compulsive spending habits afloat with a combination of side hustles, lucky rent breaks, and a solid cushion of family support, while a grad school stipend covered my baseline needs.
Sometimes I’d look at my account balances and get a jolt of stomach-wrenching anxiety. I’d promise myself I’d change. I’d spend a week or two carefully tracking my grocery spending and walking to avoid swiping my Metrocard. But, inevitably, all the tiny scrimping was negated by a dip into the shop next to my train stop after a long, terrible day in the lab, where I’d hunt for a dopamine hit to soothe my jangly brain.
Over time, without my really noticing, the stuff I bought got more expensive. The sample sales started to dry up—a signal, sort of, that the industry was getting its production more in line with demand, which is fundamentally a good thing. But it was bad news for someone like me who by that point had spent years living in luxurious fabrics for a discount. And so, thoughtlessly, I kept buying the things I wanted—now more or less at full price.
Slowly, then all at once, my cash buffer disappeared.
By early last summer, I was exhausted, disoriented, and completely drained of whatever willpower had kept my impulsive buying in check in the past. I was in the new city with that new job, but I’d left behind a mortgage on an apartment in New York, which meant that my new life was financially constrained, to say the least. I lived in a cheap, pee-yellow room in an old, creaky, dilapidated house, furnished with mismatched, ugly-but-functional pieces I’d gotten for free. I had only a suitcase or two worth of clothes. Nothing worked; nothing was comfortable; nothing was beautiful; nothing was stable.
I dove into a pleasure-seeking, experience-thirsty, borderline-manic summer. I bought the things and I did the stuff: back and forth to New York to dance with my best friend until 4 a.m. then bike home in the fluttering dawn light and wake up a few hours later to meet more friends at the beach to surf. A party or an adventure every night in DC. Skateboarding deep into night and waking up to run miles in the hot morning sun. Waltzing into stores and buying overalls and sparkly bodysuits and beach umbrellas and crop tops and leopard print slip dresses and whatever I wanted because fuck it, I wanted to build a wardrobe as wild and summery and brand new as I felt. The momentary balm of buying stuff smoothed over the existential panic simmering, barely hidden, in my cantering heart.
Falling, delirious with exhaustion and desire, into the arms of a rock climber who would lift me into the air like I was nothing, whose body fit around mine like it had been tailored to it, like the single best piece of clothing I could have found at a sample sale: the thing I didn’t know I was looking for but fit me perfectly.
The rock climber gave me a tee shirt to wear to work one day after I’d stayed over. Oversized, thick cotton, a cream color I’d never have bought for myself. I found myself wearing it as soon as I could wash it again. I’d wear it with my mustard-yellow Jesse Kamm Rangers, and feel like the me I’d always wanted to be, never mind that last night’s makeup was still smudged around my eyes.
Summer was vivid; it was perfect; and by September, on that patio in Vermont, I was drained.
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