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By Root 1138 0

cash value of an item of clothing. Some people who “hate shopping” dress themselves in a way that seems to imply a low value, or a specifically outcast status, but is really a version of claiming an elite status, by rejecting the safe, repetitive materialism of the mall. If hating shopping is so much about hating the conformity of consumerism, then loving shopping must be, to some important degree, about loving the conformity of consumerism. Many people enjoy a little bit of shopping now and again, and dress in a way that correlates well with their community and their personality. Everyone in America—be they a shopper, a shopping hater, or relatively neutral—manages their public personality in terms of brand names of various cultural meanings. A man or woman who would never wear most prominent labels forgives the issue with Levi’s, since that brand name has been shaped to mean a kind of brand-neutral authenticity. Especially for shoppers, though, the experience is one of very carefully weighed communities.

Look also at the way our choices clump. Let us just think about some contemporary health terms and the kinds of meanings attached to them. We call following the experts’ body rules fitness nowadays, though that connotes mostly exercise. Being healthy connotes mostly what you eat. Both influence what you wear. Told that you are a fitness enthusiast, I imagine you dressed in a shirt and pants of a single color made of a lab-created cloth, tight and covering the whole body, with a double stripe down the sides. Told you are “very fit,” I see you in colorful cotton clothes, close fitting, that show a lot of skin. If the first answer to “Tell me about Julie” is “She’s very healthy,” it is a reasonable guess that she would not look incongruous in hemp sandals, that her hairstyle is notably simple, and that she wears little paint on her face. She may drive a hybrid car. She is likely to eat granola, though these days it is often a sugary, fatty, processed food. In fact, to imply the hemp-sandal version of “healthy,” I might say that she’s “very granola.” Things get associated with each other that have nothing at all in common (or nothing more than any other random elements of the same world), and their values get linked, too. What associations about character go along with all this? Healthy suggests the person is happy; fitness might be associated with being a “nut” or in a “craze” and, therefore, not being happy. Granola connotes that the person is happy, but they might not make you happy if you are not granola yourself.

It can be dull when members list the group’s characteristics as if they were a natural family of associations rather than the menu of a specific restaurant, and argue for the dishes as if they were right and other food wrong. In certain clothes you can almost guess whether a person is for or against the death penalty, and when they mention to you that they are for or against the death penalty, you can say, Yes, I’m aware of your outfit’s brief.

The vast majority of human behavior may be understood as, in part, a separation of the sacred and the profane. All systems that guide such decisions are in part imaginary. Some are kinship based, or based on religion, or nation; some are based on things your father said; some are based on what you learned in school. By now you know what good is, and much of life is clearing away the stuff you dismiss and gathering in the stuff that is good. One efficient way to make a woman angry would be to buy her a purse that is much cheaper, or visually louder, or quieter than she usually carries. Why is she mad? Because you think that her sense of the sacred could include this profane object. Want to anger a man? Walk into the parking lot with him, pick out a wrong kind of car for him, and then ask him if it’s his.

As soon as the consumerist culture got going, people noticed that uniform, machine-made, replaceable things were amazing, but soulless. The original Luddites were weavers destroying stocking-making machines that were undercutting their prices, back in 1811. But since