I was born and raised in Pasadena, Calif. – one of the last bastions of preppiness on the West Coast. Pasadena’s playground of green trees, green lawns and bright blue swimming pools ill prepared me for my four-year adventure in a New Hampshire high school. After gearing up during my freshman winter break, I spent my high school career bunkered down whenever it threatened to snow and living in fear of ice patches. I held firm to the belief that people who sought out winter sports were criminally insane and had to be coaxed out to cheer for my friends during Nordic skiing races. And yet, sometime during those four years, I fell in love with snow – nature’s tabula rasa – and its magical ability to clean away the problems of the day.
I’ve since gotten over my love affair with winter weather. Snow is now an oppressive force blinding me on a sunny day and freezing me on a windy one. The terrible white menace took over our lives for a week – during which I forgot what grass looks like and could not be sure if the birdsongs I heard were real or just a hallucination from my warm weather-deprived psyche. Because I couldn’t frolic in the sunshine and eat ice cream outside and walk around without a coat on, I found new ways to cope.
I shopped online. Mostly I window-shopped online; I browsed through pages and pages of bikinis and sundresses, shorts and sandals. I supplemented the lack of meteorological warmth with the glow of my computer monitor, and I have gleaned some things from the process.
J. Crew – the great style barometer for Georgetown girls (and boys) – has literally not changed any of their products in years. Every morning I wake up to a new e-mail touting their latest pant cut, or silk top, or headband, or their mini-me versions that form their children’s line. And nothing has changed. I do not need another sleeveless silk blouse in a pastel color with ruffles along the neck. I do not need to own a cropped version of the pair of pants that I bought three years ago. Nor do I want a boyfriend blazer, boyfriend shirt, boyfriend sweater or a pair of boyfriend jeans. If they were selling the male models on their Web site, that would be another story.
The image that clothing stores project – their idealized customer – is out of touch with the reality of the consumer. Anthropologie prides itself on its intellectual quirkiness, promoting the idea that twenty-somethings should dress like sixty-somethings with a master’s degree in library sciences, a garden full of sunflowers and three cats. I can’t name a single girl who wants to look like that, yet a dress from Anthro carries this neo-bohemian, free spirit connotation that is appealing.
From the trustafarian Free People-wearer, to the young, hip, urban professional of Banana Republic, each clothing item sells a story and an image. Without the sexy, ironic, hipster branding, a T-shirt from American Apparel would just be a slim-fitting piece of overpriced cotton. There is nothing wrong with aspiration branding; it is a remarkably successful method of creating sales. Yet sometimes I think we put too much importance on the image of a J.Crew girl, a Gap person, a Benneton fan. Those pre-packaged looks are often unrealistic for the everyday consumer.
A pair of jeans is a pair of jeans, and if they fit well and are good quality we shouldn’t care where they come from. But it’s the back story to the clothing – the person we hope we become when we put the jeans on – that we buy. And buying into a name is alright, as long as you do so to project the ideal you, and not the ideal American Apparel girl. In that spirit – and when warm weather returns – I will gladly pull out all my cotton sundresses and gladiator sandals, hoping to project the carefree collegiate vibe that is my brand.
Whitney McAniff is a sophomore in the College. The 52 Percent appears every other Monday at thehoya.com.
