When I first started brainstorming this newsletter I had no idea what I wanted to talk about. My first idea was to use my free time as an unemployed homebody to try something new and insane every week. Ideas included:
Convince someone at the Venice Beach Skatepark to teach me how to Ollie.
Go shopping with Lisa Rinna.
Take my pug to see the Grand Canyon.
Have lunch with Chet Hanks.
I’m not ruling any of these things out (if anyone has an in with Hanks, please give him a “wah gwaan” from me), but it seemed like a wildly daunting task for someone who struggles to wake up before 10 a.m. I felt like after 10+ years of writing professionally I had lost all of my personal interests save for watching T.V. and going to dinners.
There is one other personal passion, though. Shopping.
There are about 5,875,324 newsletters on shopping and fashion on Substack. And a lot of those are so well done they make me ugly jealous. Erika Veurink is like a fashion Substack savant; Bella Gerard’s B List gives me the same giddy feeling I used to get when Teen Vogue came in the mail; Heather Hurst’s Pigpen feels like an affordable college course on finding your personal style; I want to go thrifting with Viv Chen.
But I continue to soldier on.
The original ethos of Abandoned Cart was to examine my relationship with shopping. I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars—I might be lowballing myself—throughout my lifetime thus far just buying stuff. Stuff used to make me happy. Some stuff still does. But as I’ve gotten older, collecting on-trend shoes from Steve Madden or putting $2,000+ on my credit card for a Givenchy bag just doesn’t hit the dopamine receptors like it used to.
Now that I’ve been unemployed for a breezy two and a half months, I can no longer just buy stuff. Every purchase must go through a series of border checks in my brain before I continue to checkout, and it’s made me wonder if fashion truly ever made me happy or if it was just the surge of adrenaline I felt when I swiped my card.
I think back to when I first started working in New York. I used to walk from my office in the West Village to SoHo and buy whatever felt trendy at the time from Zara and Topshop. I spent so much money trying to convince people that I deserved to be working alongside them and that I was, in fact, cool enough to work in fashion. Meanwhile, I could barely convince myself that either of those things were true.
Every event, red carpet, and fashion week felt like it was holding a funhouse mirror to myself. My brain became so warped by comparing myself to others that I would rarely leave my apartment—the same apartment that was full of all the stuff I bought to impress the people outside.
I’ve gotten older, I’ve gone to therapy, and I’ve been able to find a bit of respite from those feelings since my last job ended. I still feel the urge to buy, but it helps that my current budget is significantly stricter than ever before. I’m now forced to sit there and stare at the things in my various carts, dissecting their merit and making them prove their worth in my closet, rather than finding 10 different reasons to justify it.
Underconsumption is the new mot du jour (thanks, my Duolingo streak is at 622). Sometimes it feels like a knee-jerk reaction to viral Shein hauls and influencer culture, a dramatic swing of the pendulum before gravity pulls it right back. It’s certainly not a bad thing. Everyone could use more tips on how to thrift and source vintage. We can see landfills full of clothes from space, after all. But people are always going to be buying stuff, whether it’s a vintage J.Crew sweater, an investment piece from The Row, or 15 of the same skirt in different colors from Amazon. As someone who’s participated in some version of each in my lifetime, I’m just trying to understand the why and take it from there.
Which brings us to today. For a shopping newsletter, there isn’t a ton of shopping going on for me right now, but I have plenty of carts that sit abandoned in open tabs on my computer. I’m still digging and liking my way through Poshmark and Vestiaire—I’m just letting things marinate a little longer before I decide if and when I want to check out. To me, that’s progress.
I’m looking forward to using this space to talk with people I admire about what’s going on in their own carts. You can expect the first iteration of that in the next week or so. I might also start sharing the things I’ve been eyeing but managed to talk myself out of (or, occasionally, into).
Turns out, I still love fashion. I love the feeling of wearing something that looks just as good in real life as it did in my head (a rare feat). I love rediscovering old favorites in my closet and finding new ways to wear them. I love telling people how my bracelet is actually from my mom’s first husband who I didn’t know existed until I was like, 14. And you don’t get to tell stories like that when your bracelet is from Zara.
I take responsibility for sharing this shopping addiction with you.
We both are a work in progress.❤️❤️