Confessions of a Shopping Fan

A Visit to the Museum of Consumer Goods explained and justified

Today I drove past the weary, hulking carcass of the former Fred Segal store on the Sunset Strip and felt wistful. To be honest, I was never a Fred Segal partisan. The store was so rabbit-warren-y that I could never understand where to find things I liked, and most of the items struck me as overpriced Juicy Couture, a lot of bedazzled tops and shredded jeans and ratty-on-purpose granny dresses. But I appreciated that Fred Segal existed, and respected that it embodied, and maybe helped create, a certain California aesthetic, the I-would-rather-be-surfing vibe, done very expensively but intentionally unluxuriously. I knew people who practically lived there, and counted the days until the storewide sales—evidently a real scene, which I’m sad to have never witnessed.

But I’m bummed that it’s gone. I hate when stores go out of business. When they’re open, they are part of urban texture, and they are the little energy cells that animate cities. I didn’t shop much at Fred Segal, but I liked driving by and knowing it was humming.

I love stores. I love being in stores and gobbling them up visually; I think it’s the most fun in the world. When I travel I go into stores all the time. To thwart shop-shaming I tell people I am visiting “the museum of consumer goods”. When I’m out of town, I usually look for stores that we don’t have in Los Angeles, but sometimes it’s interesting to do a compare-and-contrast, as I did this spring when I was in London and spent time in Uniqlo. (With the exception of Uniqlo in Tokyo, which is monumental and worth your time, the regional outposts of Uniqlo are mostly identical. But I did find a jacket in London that was sold out at the store in LA, so I’m not complaining.)

Saying you love shopping is not cool. It is like declaring you’re dumb, materialistic, vapid, aimless, and profligate. I hereby push back, heartily. Stores are marketplaces, crossroads of consumer goods; they are where to see what humans create and consume. They’re interesting. I even enjoy browsing in a bad store—a store that has stuff that’s crappy or ugly or useless—because I am intrigued by how and why they exist. Remember that SNL sketch about a Scotch Tape Boutique? I would happily wander through a Scotch Tape boutique, and would find it quite amazing to see the variety of products. I’d probably also find it compelling to talk to someone who owned a Scotch Tape boutique, to learn what extraordinary life journey led them to such an undertaking. Don’t tell me that’s not fascinating.

I think when most people say they hate shopping they mean they hate looking for something and not finding it and being frustrated by it, and finding the array of wrong things to be soul-crushing. I hate that, too. I can’t stand shopping when I need a specific thing for a specific reason—usually an item of clothing for a very particular event—and feeling, as one does, that everything misses by a mile. That’s a goal-oriented undertaking, and it’s about successfully achieving the goal, rather than it being about the experience of partaking of the world’s material goods.

One of my favorite trips ever was to Istanbul, where we wandered through the Grand Bazaar. We weren’t in the market for anything, really, but it felt like the very heart of Istanbul, the throbbing muscle of the city. It’s that kind of place where you’re likely to bump into something surprising, or into someone you hadn’t expected to see. Maybe that’s why I defend shopping—real life shopping, that is—with no shame whatsoever. So farewell, Fred Segal, and all the zillions of other stores that have withered away in the last few years: I will definitely miss you even if I didn’t love you.

SHOW NOTES

—Two movies I urge you to see, pronto: The Outrun and A Different Man. Both sound sort of unpromising, if you just read the loglines, but I loved them both.

—Can we spend a little time celebrating the shocking resurrection of The Gap? I don’t think I’d bought anything from it in, oh, thirty years, and as I watched branch after branch close up, I figured we’d be writing the obituary for the brand sooner or later. And then, boom! I believe the new direction is thanks to the 2024 hiring of Zac Posen, and suddenly the clothes are very cool. I just got a bunch of velvet things (slip dress, tube top, and so forth) from the newest collection and love them all.

—If you want to dive into a fascinating historical document, don’t overlook Wisconsin Death Trip. I won’t describe it because it’s better to just read it/look at it without advance description. Speaking of demythologizing the American frontier, I’m thinking of rewatching Deadwood. Join me?