Love Sweet Love

Falling hard and then breaking up with brands: A Love Story

My beloved husband notwithstanding, my most passionate, intense love affairs have been with brands. Oh, that first flirtation! The tender inquiries, the full-throttle embrace, the conviction that this is the love that will at last bring order and harmony to my world—and then, in time, comes the pain of disenchantment, the disconnection, the creeping alienation, and finally, TheRealReal. Have you fallen this way, this hard?

I fell for my first brand soon after I moved to New York and started thinking a little more carefully about how I dressed. That was 1987, during the era when the Gap was cool. I lived a block away from a Gap, on West 86th Street on the Upper West Side, and I began noticing things in the window that I liked.

Not only is this a Gap jacket: It’s a Gap Kids jacket. I loved it beyond all measure. Happy to report I still have it and still wear it: It survived my Gap divorce.

I was working at home then, and always trawled for excuses to get out of my apartment to confirm I was actually alive and able to interact with other humans. Walking to the Gap and browsing became my regular break. Ah, for those days of the Gap! During that period, the company had branched out from jeans and sweatshirts, and they must have had a bunch of groovy people on their design team because they cranked out season after season of cute, functional, sassy clothes that suited me perfectly. I bought armloads of stuff. It wasn’t just that I liked the clothes: I felt like I found a brand that manifested me: I felt understood. Of course that sounds crazy, being “understood” by a clothing manufacturer, but surely you know the feeling of finding something that you would have designed for yourself if you knew how to design? And also that thing has a few added flourishes that tickle you? An extra belt loop that seems so clever, or a color that makes you think you will never need another color as long as you live?

My visits to that store on W 86th Street had all the contours of a love affair. I couldn’t wait to break away from my computer and race over. I was giddy. I felt pretty in its embrace. And, as with any affair, I returned home sheepishly with my haul, knowing I had overdone it. I became expert at justifying why each piece was necessary, and why if I liked something in navy I probably ought to get it in black, too. Each price tag yanked off gave me a zing of pleasure.

The end of my infatuation with the Gap came hard, as the materials got cheaper, the styling got duller. Yes, I outgrew it. It was largely the fault of my job at Vogue. I had been hired by Anna Wintour to write general features, not fashion, but suddenly I was around a lot of people who looked really great, and I noticed. My Gap gear started to look collegiate and overly khaki. Also, the staff at Vogue was invited to sample sales a day before the general public, and I started to tag along, first out of curiosity and then out of burning desire. We got dibs on the best stuff, before it was pawed over by the public. I got a quick education in designers I had never heard of and never imagined I could afford. It was a gateway drug. Only someone stronger than I could have resisted.

Soon, my afternoon perambulations to the Gap on 86th evolved into a slightly longer hike to Columbus and 72nd, to the open arms of Charivari, a designer boutique that introduced edgy designers like Issey Miyake, Kenzo, Yamamoto, and Comme des Garçons to New York. It barely makes sense on a continuum, but I made a silky slide from my khaki Gap days to a new very different me, the Comme des Garçons me. I fell hard. Suddenly, black, angular, sculpted, deconstructed clothes felt like the end-all and be-all. It was everything I wanted. I was so thrilled by every CDG piece I saw that I overrode my budget to be with it. I suppose it was like having a young and demanding lover who expected me to rent him a pied-a-terre and provide expensive cologne. I complied. And I didn’t object. I felt like I had found a new language, and of course I was certain not just that I have found “a” new language but my one and only language, my true tongue, the one I would speak forever.

The problem isn’t falling in love. It’s perspective. I never take these infatuations lightly. I never have the wisdom to know that when I’ve found something new and interesting, I should sample rather than devour. I take each love affair as profound, earth-shaping, as being the answer to every question—the question being, I suppose, what to wear and how I want the world to see me. In other words, I start buying everything I can from the brand, convinced it’s forever. Only fools fall in love! And fools also fall out of love. I never stopped loving CDG. I think I just overdosed, as one would, and then there were a few seasons that even a groupie couldn’t love, featuring giant random humps of fabric and freak-show silhouettes. These days, my relationship with CDG is healthier. It’s less obsessive, and instead it’s warm, fond, appreciative—the sort of old-shoe comfort level you feel with a former boyfriend when you’ve both found new mates but have stayed friends.

I wish I could say that my gentle break-up with CDG signaled a new maturity, and that I now have the wisdom to not look at a designer with the same unalloyed passion leading to mad overbuying, but, alas, I can’t. I bounced from CDG to Sacai and then to Hannoh Wessel and then to Tibi, each time having the eureka moment as if I’d never had it before. I’m such a softie! I take each fall as the One True Love, and I overweight my closet portfolio, certain This is The Last Time I will go insane for a designer. In the heat of that passion, it makes perfect sense, and then temperatures drop and I realize that once again I went overboard. Oh god.

Why only get a Sacai bandana skirt when you can also get a Sacai bandana sweater? Enough is never enough, until it’s enough.

Look, it’s not all bad. I’m glad I can still get pitter-patter about something new; isn’t that the sign of being alive? And as an all-or-nothing sort of person, I suppose it’s inevitable that I gorge. Unlike my relationship with my ex-husband (non-existent), I still am buddies with every brand I loved before, and I can even get a little sentimental about how madly I fell when I fell.

Show notes!

—I just went to a Marfa Stance trunk show and died a little. Everything was gorgeous and very, very expensive.

—I can’t wait to read Tommy Orange’s new book Wandering Stars

—I battled my way through a migraine to finish this post, so forgive any glitches. Send me your remedies. I’ve tried everything.

—Come to think of it, I might write something about trunk shows soon. I love that they still exist.