[It's weird that the same week I buy something from J. Crew for the first time in some 7 years, I also stumble across this old article of mine, originally published in the Chicago Maroon on 30 September 1997. I'll wait for you to calculate its age. In a further stroke of luck, I even found the original graphic. I'm putting this up without rereading it, but know that I was tremendously proud of it 11+ years ago.]
I admit it, only reluctantly. Only among my closest friends it was once that I could calmly bear discovery of the tiny stack of magazines in the “not-books/other” section midway through my second bookcase. But then I started thinking to myself that this affliction was not really one over which to constantly grow shame. These magazines were, and are, after all, merely, J. Crew catalogs.
Never in my life have I worn a J. Crew article of clothing. Never in my life has the catalog been dropped, even on accident, in my mailbox. And never in my life have I acquired the catalog with a completely clear conscience. Usually there is a bit of subterfuge involved — say a quick survey of other building-dwellers before the catalog slips gently against my warming chest, or a later vigorous blackening with a marker of the address to which the catalog was intended (lest the Feds break down my door and drag me away for J. Crew malfeasance).
Pornography, in perhaps the loosest sense, is imagery designed to fill the consumer with a certain level of fantasy — by definition, sexual. The world within the pages of porn is designed to swell a specific sex-fantasy, leaving the consumer, sprawled over a toilet bowl, trying to interpret the fantasy in some visceral physical way.
For me, J. Crew does the same thing — except for one crucial detail: the fantasies exist as fantasies, to be sure, but there is nothing sexual about it. I do not see in the catalog women after whom I lust; I see either a nubile woman in a Rayon/cotton blend lilac cable crewneck (44564A $88), or my investment banker in his plaid flannel hunter button down (10106B $38), ready for to help coach the little league lacrosse team.
There exists a future captured within the pages of a J. Crew catalog (any J. Crew catalog) that fits rather nicely the fantasy of a future that I hold in the back of my mind. It shows comfort, ease, leisure. Clothing is often framed against a backdrop of barn doors, wooden fences, rocking chairs and old bicycles. It’s a future of the familiar, and of the comfortable.
On pages 30–31 of the Fall 1996 catalog there sits a photo above four pairs of jeans of a young couple seated on a sofa. She’s wearing a soft grass sweater (I could not find the specifics in the catalog), high-riding white shorts that look like an undergarment, and cotton/nylon denim courtside socks (92894B $8). He’s wearing a wool sweater (again I could not find the details) and the Relaxed Fit 14-wale corduroy stonewashed soft jeans with the vintage-style copper hardware and the zip fly (10626B $42). They sit at each end of the sofa, legs and feet intertwined, as she studies, hair throwntogether, the stock listings. He, on the other hand, with an almost lecherous smirk, reads the Sunday funnies. Perfect … so Perfect.
And then I flip back to the front of that catalog and look at the added cover which reads, in large print, “Our heart is in the game.” I had only read those words for the first time recently, after almost a year of casual perusal. “We take it to heart,” the passage continues, “every time we gain an admirer … or lose one. It’s such a long time since we’ve heard from you. Did we let you down somehow? If so, we’d like to make amends, and hope this credit shows you our heart is in it.” The text is superimposed over a man I’m convinced teaches history at Andover, holding a football, earnestness on his sleeve.
“Did we let you down somehow?” Oh, J. Crew, what a patently absurd question that is! Thumbing through the catalog has become near torture now — I drift off to unreachable worlds of beaches, where I casually watch, through my lightweight matte aluminum Café sunglasses (12862A $42), the Perfect walk past, women in the mini print bikini set, with the high-cut leg, slight front dip, and full back coverage (67304A $54), men in wet seven-inch inseam pleated wheat chino shorts (84623A $30), with the cotton stripe V-neck pigment printed short-sleeved jersey (4746A $28) tossed over their amazingly-tanned left shoulders. Perfect. Perfect.
“Did we let you down somehow?” I can only sigh when I close the catalog out of frustration, since this future is doomed to always be that, and never a reality. The man on page 31 does not exist, of course. So why should I want his life?
Furthermore, the mere fact that I stroll around the Midway midwinter in the Barn jacket with 150-gram Thinsulate and the quilted plaid flannel lining (95283S $98) does not guarantee the pretensions to the modestly furnished apartment 20 blocks south of Harlem on Park which has captured my imagination so fully. Looking through the catalogs is almost an exercise in guilt and depression on the level of masturbation — both leave the person yearning for a reality to fulfill the fantasy, a yearning that is both depressing since it will likely not arrive, and guilty since the person feels like such a fool for being suckered by the fantasy in the first place.
However, the lust dripping from each J. Crew page is not a lust for sex, but rather a lust for financial security and social standing. When asked what I want to do when I grow up, I often facetiously answer “marry well,” and the J. Crew catalog, with its own ego-destroying poison, is the best reminder of why it is exactly that I want to do just that.
Tags: Andover, class mobility, clothing, commodity fetish, fantasy, j. crew, materialism, pornography
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