One of the most humiliating things about being a human is having to wear clothes all the time. For most people, this means having to go shopping to hide their indecent bodies. Unfortunately, unlike basic necessities like eating and sleeping, shopping can be embarrassing.
I love shopping. I’m good at shopping. I’m great at browsing. I know how to find the good stuff. I check racks of clothes quickly and thoroughly. I feel fabrics, note colors and textures, evaluate weights and details. There’s a lot of information to take in, but I’m very capable of processing it all. I know a lot about clothes. Clothes have been a big part of my work for the past 15 years or so. I love touching and talking about clothes. But still, shopping feels at least a little embarrassing. Why?
I’m comfortable trying things on and asking for sizes, even though it’s undignified to go into a store and try on a few clothes in front of strangers. I’m okay with that. I also don’t mind putting on a comical performance like pushing your thumb into the gap between your toe and the top of the shoe while trying something on. Will these shoes fit? Walk around the store, do some jumping jacks, look longingly into the face of anyone brave enough to make eye contact with you and ask, “Are they OK?”
The challenge is to openly expose your real-time, evolving tastes to the world, or at least to store clerks and embarrassed shoppers. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that shopping is essentially about finding something new. There is always the risk that the new thing will make you look foolish. For some, the new is just a variation on the old; a substitution, if you will. For others, the new is a radical departure from the old; a reinvention. Either way, shopping is an act of discovery, and that can only be done by taking a short walk through the store, a journey of self-discovery, while others watch.
Along the way, you have to complete a series of small, and perhaps humiliating tasks, like digging your arm into the collar of your shirt to search for the price tag like you’re searching for a catfish in mud. And when you can’t find the price tag, you’re forced to ask the most humiliating question of all: “How much is it?” The salesperson always replies that they don’t know but will check. This leads to a long, tense moment where you doubt yourself and regret all the decisions that got you to this moment. Anyway, you don’t really want to buy the item, you’re just curious, but since you’ve come this far, maybe you should just put your card down and be done with it.
The embarrassing thing about shopping is money. Clothes are expensive. At least, they should be. If they aren’t, someone somewhere along the production chain has been exploited. Essentially, there are two main scenarios with money and shopping, both of which involve some degree of embarrassment. The first is, I can’t afford it. This isn’t embarrassing to admit; it happens to everyone. But when you try on a jacket in the store, turn around in the mirror, realign your entire life and personality around the garment, and realize that there’s at least one more zero on the price tag than you thought there was… that embarrassment burns into that moment of disappointment. That moment when you realize you were just playing house.
