You’re cured
Self-delusion and New Year’s resolutions
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Maybe it’s my brain chemistry, maybe it’s just a function of growing up in the 20th century, but since adolescence I (Jonah) have been prone to runs of what you could call Fiendish Undead Garment Acquisition Zombie Mania (F.U.G.A.Z.M.)
During these runs I chain-cop one piece of clothing after another, in a jittery, careening, quasi-fugue state that mixes something that feels like exhilaration, but probably isn’t, with something that feels self-destructive, and probably is.
This shouldn’t come as an enormous surprise. I co-created a fantastic newsletter heavily dedicated to yanking clothes and the Slapper Sciences generally. But most people who read Blackbird Spyplane are likely to assume from the big-brained insights and constantly correct opinions that I am some Flawless Superbeing Who Does Only Cool Things. I’m here to tell you point blank that it isn’t that simple. I too am capable of moments that verge on the unenlightened and flirt, even, with the unhinged.
I still own the very first garment I went F.U.G.A.Z.M. on. It’s a black Stüssy tee with a cartoon race-car on the front & back. I was around 13 when I saw it on a sale rack at Pacific Sunwear, marked down from maybe $20 to maybe $12. I’d been infatuated with Stüssy for a year or two by that point. I’d taught myself to draw their logo, covering various notebook covers with my rendition. I’d popped into Union on Spring Street to ogle their stock. But I owned nothing from the brand — too expensive.
The $12 tee was not my favorite thing they’d ever put out, but it was the first thing I could almost afford. I spent several weeks fixating on it, turning it over in my mind, lending it an increasingly fantastical status, and hoping no one would snatch it before I’d saved up enough allowance money to buy it.
Even at ~13, I was old enough to know that this fixation was only partially about the actual shirt. It was also about the fact that it was on sale, about the cool things I imagined it would project about me, how impressed I imagined kids at school would be, etc.
I also sensed that my fixation was to some irreducible degree about itself — that the Stüssy tee was a pretext for the queasy pleasures of pure acquisitive obsession. This was confirmed when I finally bought it, and rather than feeling some rush of deep satisfaction, I began casting about right away for something new to obsess over in its place.
I don’t want to trivialize addictive behavior, but there are obvious parallels. There is a disordered aspect of my relationship to clothes that I’ve improved over the years but never permanently kicked. Sometimes my “relapses” are worse than others, and this past fall was one such time. I created a bunch of new eBay saved searches. I found myself typing the names of various labels and grails into Japanese auction proxies multiple times a day like a human bot — smashing the Buy Now when I got the right hit, only to quickly return to searching. I added garments to cart at some of my favorite stores, removed them, added them again, left them open in tabs, copped. I visited shops to try things on, told myself I didn’t need them, then returned to pull the trigger after a week or two of letting the brain worms fester.
By late November, I occasionally found myself gripped by an intense, free-floating desire to acquire, searching for garments to feed into that feeling post hoc, like firewood. The upshot is that over four months I bought an abbondanza of clothes ranging from “very nice” to “elite-tier,” in increasingly rapid succession, and they joined the ranks of other beautiful clothes I haven’t worn as much as I’d like. (Plus some fantastic new socks I do wear, day in, day out.)
I’m far from alone in this, of course. I think lots of people who care about clothes have a relationship to them that can feel disordered. This is because clothes conjoin the itchy fever of base consumerism with the intoxicating belief that you can endlessly refine and remodel your self-image by buying the right ones.
Pathologies around clothes are widespread, and since Spyplane Day One, these pathologies — in me, in others — have been a core preoccupation and one of the sletter’s core conditions: I’m not just the co-president, I’m also a client.
But early January, of course, is “renewal season.” It’s when we attempt to ritualistically remedy all manner of excessive behaviors that reach extremes in November and December, stuffed with parties, feasts, gift-giving, sales we’d be wise to ignore but don’t, and so on.
We resolve to stop doing so much x and to start doing more y. We commit to Dry Months. We embark on diets and detoxes. And if we’re pathology-prone clothes appreciators, we might find ourselves actively trying to remedy our compulsions around garment-copping via resolutions and mitigation techniques of varying effectiveness…
Some people borrow the “Dry January” model and apply it to clothes, vowing to cop nothing for the entire month — the idea being that, come February, they will have significantly reset and recalibrated their compulsions.
Some try to set a cap on all purchases they make throughout the coming year to some dollar amount or to, say, 5 or 10 pieces, so that they can be more “intentional” about each thing they buy.
Some people set ethical restrictions and red lines, vowing, for example, to only buy secondhand clothes; to only buy clothes in person from independent shops; to buy zero clothes made from petroleum; to buy zero clothes from brands owned by LVMH and other cursed conglomerates; to only buy clothes made from natural and/or organic and/or natural-dyed and/or undyed fibers… etc.
On some Scared Straight s**t, some look at fit pics where other people look swag-deficient in box-fresh clothes, trapped in the State of Shopping Death Loop. They say, “Time to chill with the new purchases lest I look that wack myself.”
Conversely, you could see someone swaggily rocking a well-worn garment that you also own but haven’t worn enough, and take inspiration from how much better it looks with use. For instance, I could admire this picture of gifted actor Charles Melton freaking a yurple corduroy jacket — fabric saucefully rumpled, flap pocket rakishly half-tucked, collar insouciantly splayed...
I own the same jacket, but have only worn it a handful of times. Melton drives home the fact that I should rock it more instead of buying anything new. This is probably the only thing getting in the way of me being as hot as Charles Melton this year.
Relatedly —
Some people know that if they rely on a negative framework of Copping Less, they’ll chafe against the Deprivation Vibes and break their own rules. Instead, they try to adopt a positive framework that foregrounds Pleasure.
They might identify garments they already own and feel especially great in, and keep like a running journal or notes-app tally where they simply notch how many times they wear each one. The higher the number, the more time you’ve spent enjoying a beloved banger.
This is sort of like setting daily goals for flights climbed and steps stepped: It participates in a bit of torched spreadsheetification, not to mention some of the bureacratic inanity of driving down “Cost Per Wear.” But what I like is that it’s about driving UP an inarguably tighter metric: “Joy Per Garment.” Considered this way, buying new clothes will impinge on the joy you could be feeling rocking clothes you already have.
🛠️🧠⚡ And in that blessed, big-brained spirit—
Some people pause to simply exult in feelings of gratitude for the abundance of gifts they are so fortunate to enjoy. They crowd out cold, empty F.U.G.A.Z.M. thirst with the radiant warmth and fullness of this gratitude.
And if their brains are especially robust & craggy, they plant one foot outside the arena entirely, focusing less on fine-tuned “hacks” to their relationship to copping and more on throwing themselves into different, non-acquisitive interests, hobbies and causes.
They realize that, past a certain point, they’ve been using slapper accumulation as a means to simply kill time. They know they can fix this, and be much happier — without sacrificing slapper appreciation! — if they find ways to fill more time more rewardingly. (A huge, connected insight: Spend less idle time on your phone.)
It’s not an either/or proposition, of course. You can combine any of the above maneuvers. But this last one strikes me as the best of the bunch, since it’s a way to address root problems beneath all kinds of other unhealthy behaviors.
Please be clear: It remains the official Spyplane position that coming into possession of sick clothes is very fire. But buying a garment is very rarely, if ever, an accomplishment. Not in any first-order sense of the word, anyway. It just feels enough like it that we can delude ourselves. Wear dope clothes while doing other dope things, and give the Deluded Fugues a miss.
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vulnerability is swaggy as hell. thanks for this.
I, too, suffer. I also look fantastic :). I got an app that gives me dork stats (wears, brand, fabric, costs). I totaled up all I spent - hair stood on end. Fall was a lot. Often, though, I think of your valorization of the worn, including banged up older people. Thank you for that.