living in a material world...

a good friend of mine had been working at a high profiled job for about a year when she fell hard for a marc jacobs handbag...her boyfriend was visiting from the small midwestern town where they'd both gone to school...and bloomingdale's was having a sale...so off they went...

this bag meant a lot of things to my girlfriend...an achievement, a celebration of a successful beginning to what she was hoping would be a long career in her industry...it felt like an arrival in the glamorous and sophisticated world where she was feeling more and more at home...

and also: how gorgeous the thing itself! smooth leather, shiny buckles, elegant shape...my girlfriend was learning to appreciate thngs like quality and design, and of this she was sure...the bag was an absolute gem...

little did she know that the bag would soon come to symbolize the end of her relationship...

"we got home, and he said he didn't see us together anymore," she recalls..."he said that the woman who would be his wife wouldn't care about things like that...he said he'd begun to wonder, if we had children, would i prioritize shoes over food for the kids?"

are you serious??

he questioned who he thought she was...and he called her materialistic...

materialism...it's a word that connotes greed, extravagance, gluttony...the word "materialistic" has some harsh synonyms...selfish, unprincipled, callous...it suggests a person who is shallow, who prizes things material over those emotional...but does wanting a great bag really make you a bad person? harsh implications for a single handbag...but i've noticed that a lot of women who care about fashion get labeled this...sort of as a matter of course...

and since this is the industry i have chosen for myself...and have been working at for several years now...i have felt the butt end of this critique from so many directions...from the ex-boyfriend's snide comments about my desire to visit a new boutique shop (somehow seen as morally bankrupt compared with, say, spending many hours in a stereo shop) to people i call friends...i remember one coming to watch me speak at a function and sputtering later about how vile and pathetic the audience had seemed...with their questions about trends and style...a cruel diagnosis, i thought, for a bunch of women who'd gone out for a glass of champagne and a little shopping on a spring evening after work...and what exactly was she implying about me, standing up there talking about colors and silhouettes?

what is it about an interest in nice things that begs for criticism? can good morals not sleep on high-thread-count sheets and walk in expensive shoes?

perhaps...like many insults..."materialist" is hurled by those who feel vulnerable...sometimes when people ask what i do...they become immediately self-conscious..."well, then you can probably tell my shoes are cheap," they might say, as if i were looking...as if i care...

i suppose jealousy...which first rears its head in the sandbox and, sadly, continues into adulthood...can play a role as well...it's easier to insult what you covet than to confront covetous feelings...it's the same phenomenon that finds us all delighting in the meltdowns of rich, beautiful celebrities...when i think about why my friend had to insult the women at the function...it's not shocking to remember that she was having a particularly dark self-esteem moment...

does it really have to be this way? after all...one of the treats of being female is the enjoyment we get from a gorgeous dress...an elegant pair of shoes...and the fun we have searching for these things with friends...

there is a whole pile of new research suggesting that fashion is...in fact...good for you! it can trigger spikes in dopamine...that happy brain love-chemical that keeps you lively...and...two leading brain researchers at johns hopkins have concluded that as shopping requires a trifecta of healthy behaviors - physical activity, decision making, and a positive self-image...it might actually help keep you alive longer...a canadian psychologist wrote a book called the shoe diet, which says that the adrenaline rush you feel when you find a perfect pair of shoes could help you lose weight...hmmm...hasn't seemed to help me with my weight loss...maybe i'm not buying enough shoes =), and psychologists at the university of leicester, in england, claim that being well-dressed can protect you from being hit by a car. (drivers, apparently, are more likely to stop for you in a crosswalk if you're looking sharp)

of course, there are extremes...an interest in things material can all too easily move from healthy to pathological...i once sat through a dinner party with a woman so fixated on my dress - "I. MUST. HAVE. THAT. DRESS," she kept saying, her teeth alarmingly clenched...that i was afraid to go to the bathroom alone...and there's a colleague who greets me not by saying hello or how are you but with a lusty shout-out to an item of clothing or accessory that i am wearing...
these people might have issues...

but there is, as with all things in life...a nice middle path...i believe in moderate materialism...

so...were my girlfriend to buy shoes instead of baby food (which she never would), this would be a problem...but buying a marc jacobs bag? perfectly reasonable...(for the record: her boyfriend was begging for forgiveness within months...but she had happily moved on...as of this writing...she has a second marc jacobs bag and a new boyfriend, who understands that the bags compliment, rather than define , who she is)

i remember hearing one say that shopping was good for your self-esteem...kinda makes sense...nice clothes make you feel better...healthy shoppers are healthy people...capable of taking pride in their appearance and themselves...capable of enjoying beauty and quality and of finding themselves worthy for such good things...

when i asked one of my impeccable friends if she's ever been called materialistic, she answers with a laugh, "not to my face." but as we discuss our relationship to our stuff, she tells me that a great part of the enjoyment she gets out of her clothes is that wearing them is a means of celebrating someone else's genius. "i was once in the hong kong airport," she says, and diane von furstenberg was in front of me in line at customs...she was going on and on about the beauty of the terminal, and i was so struck by it - i thought, here is someone who views the entire world in terms of creativity."

materialist? no...but acutely aware, and appreciative, of beauty and design...

but all this justification aside, i've been guilty of torturing myself...i backpedal...sometimes...when i meet new people...yes, i live fashion...but i read the paper! i volunteer! a stylist friend called me one afternoon - a magazine was running a profile on her many successes and had asked why she became a stylist...this friend is clever and funny, generous and talented...her facility with all things is visual...she loves making people look, and therefore feel, fantastic...but after years in the fashion world...we knew what people expected to hear...would read between the lines no matter what she said...we also knew that whatever anyone chose to believe...it wouldn't change the truth of things...so, giggling away, we decided she should just answer, "because i'm shallow," and leave it at that...