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Consumed by consumption | page 1, 2, 3
This college operated on an inverse relationship between household income and how well a person dressed. The affluent kids dressed in Bohemian chic: They wore faded jeans, sweaters with holes, T-shirts with environmental slogans and fabrics from Third World countries. The kids in Diesel jackets or color-coordinated Gap jeans and T-shirts, the kids who pointed out the fabric of their sweater or gave you a daily update on their classical CD collection (made possible by the Visa card that mysteriously appeared in the campus mailbox of every 18-year-old) were invariably the ones with class anxiety. Also Today Lessons in consumption The affluent kids claimed to be rabidly against any form of commercialism, materialism, exploitation of forests, farmworkers or factory workers. You would never see them in Nike tennis shoes, though Doc Martens, John Fluevogs and Birkenstocks were OK. Of course they were against materialism: They already had large houses, good food, trips to Europe and Latin America, a good education and intellectual sparring partners in their family's living rooms. If you couldn't interest them in a Tommy Hilfiger jacket or a Luis Vuitton handbag, it was only because they were busy competing over their relative fluency in French, Russian or Japanese. But fluency in French is usually a lot more expensive than some damn handbag. To begin with, you usually have to drum up the funds to spend some time France. Of course, one of the other truths is that kids in this class, kids who have been raised to inconspicuously consume, usually don't want to be investment bankers (in my experience, most of the people who went straight from college into some lucrative career were people who had never had money to begin with). They want to be artists or social workers or writers or book editors or professors. And this means that eventually, a good many of them will spend a few years in "respectable" poverty. Of course, some of these kids still have trust funds, but most of them don't. And most of the time, checks stop coming from parents, if they came at all, soon after college. But a Bohemian period -- the requisite amount of time spent unconcerned with one's possessions -- didn't work for me. There is nothing charming or romantic about raising a child with very little money. I didn't kill any little old ladies with knives, but I did find myself, after college, with a very bad, very low-paying job in a phone bank, as well as an ugly apartment and a serious sense of dislocation. I became predictably depressed. I was very self-indulgent and spent a lot of time lamenting my lot. My friends were sick of me. I was, as they say, very high maintenance. I was not a fun person. I was still writing (freelance, at night, between the hours of 2 and 7 a.m.), but I had pretty much lost my identity. We still had books; I presumably still knew the work of the same French philosophers I'd always known. But I was not a student, I was not a professional, I was simply a very poor, very young, single mother in a very big city. In college, at least my daughter's school had been small and everyone had known my university's pedigree, which counted for something at parent-teacher conferences. Now, I had a shitty job and everyone knew our income, because it seemed that we had to turn in a form every week with the figure written all over it: We qualified for free lunch, subsidized day care and student-loan deferments. All of this was very helpful -- in fact, mandatory -- but it also changed the way people looked at us. Suddenly, my daughter's grief over the death of her pet mouse meant that the teacher called me in to talk about where exactly her father lived. When she had a bad cough at school, the teacher sent home notes asking about our health insurance. My nearby relatives would invite us to visit and ask if we needed bus fare. Maintaining the illusion that everything was OK required some very careful inconspicuous consumption. I had to selectively consume above my means, but -- because an important part of being middle class is wise consumption -- I had to do this in such a way that it appeared invisible. Stuff became important again. Stuff like silk sweaters with just one tiny hole or a pair of very old, very faded Diesel jeans from thrift stores (consignment was well out of my league). Even labels started to matter again. I hadn't paid much attention to our clothes for the past five years, but when Gap Kids had a 75 percent off sale, I asked for early Christmas money from my mother. When relatives sent us clothes from discount stores, I tried to hide them in the bottom of the laundry hamper. When the same relatives would extend social invitations, I would show up with a bottle of wine or a small birthday present, even if I had $14 left for the week. I combined my first two freelance checks to buy an interview suit. Today, I am actually middle class, demographically speaking. I still have a small apartment, no car, not a lot of furniture. Some days I show up for work in my old black wool sweater and jeans, but if I have to dress up, I have the shoes, I have the dress, I have the coat. I like the feeling of my check card going through, of buying small-pored French soap, of saying yes when my daughter asks for some large object (last month, it was a 3.5-foot stuffed shark), of buying a household object when we need it (last week it was a vacuum). Theoretically, it's possible that I will one day have the means and the class confidence to consume in a way that directly expresses my values. Unlike Melissa, I won't need to steal my logo to tell the world who I am. If I buy silk or cotton, organic or non, wine or whiskey, it will not be because I wish to declare my identity to the world, but to express my identity to myself. This will never happen. Not to me -- nor to anyone, I believe. Because having the means and the confidence to choose what to consume is itself a luxury.
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