Uniformity

So I tried to go shopping today. We have this Valentine's gig coming up, so I sort of thought a new dress would be nice, and I had a gift card.

I really don't like shopping. And today, I remembered why.

I find it very depressing. Usually, as today, I have a pretty specific idea of what I want in my mind. And it has nothing to do with what's available in the stores. But what's sad is that once you've been in a couple of stores, you could almost skip the rest of them. Because even though the individual items of clothing are technically different from the ones at other stores, they're not really.

At any given time, there are about 5 colors of clothing you can buy in the mall. Today, it was black and white (sometimes accented with bright yellow), bright red, aubergine (fancy mall-speak for dark purple), turquoise-based prints and a weird green. Unfortunately for me, I was looking for something burgundy-ish, between bright red and aubergine. But that color doesn't really exist right now.

I remember this from high school. You could stand outside any one store and if you tried to look at the store as a whole, only three or so colors would stand out. If you wanted something different, you were out of luck. Even more depressingly, it's not just true for colors; the design and shape of the garments are also basically uniform from store to store. So if a particular cut doesn't suit you, you'd better hope the clothes from the last trend continue to fit you till the current one passes.

The same thing is true of shoes. If you wanted a certain shape of shoe, you'd better hope it's what all shoes look like right now, or you're not going to find it.

Obviously, this reality is not complete, or there would have been no point at all in my continuing my quest past the second store. (As luck would have it, the store with the gift card had no dresses at all. Did I mention that I hate shopping?) At, say, every other store there will be one or two garments that are actually not like what you've seen before.

Today turned out to be a good day, in fact. At the very last place I looked -- and I mean, the last place I was going to look before giving up -- I actually found what I wanted, almost. It was almost exactly the cut of dress I had in my head when I started. Hadn't seen anything like that anywhere. It was majorly on sale, like most of what I'd seen. (The stores are clearly hurting.) And it fit, even though it was a size smaller than I usually wear. (I suspect size flattery.) It wasn't burgundy though -- it was the exact same color of purple as the stuff in the other 15 stores. (That's how I knew to call it aubergine; it was on the label.) But even though the color was a little darker than I was wanting, I decided to get it, once I realized it was even more on sale than I'd originally thought. Eighteen bucks, actually, down from seventy.

But I still came home depressed about my foray into consumerism. Because the total uniformity of the clothes in stores means one or both of two things: 1) the designers don't let themselves have original ideas and just copy off each other. 2) they've figured out that the people who shop mostly feel most comfortable if they know that they will be wearing what everyone else is wearing, which they'll have to be because they are the only clothes available in stores. I suspect it's more number two than number one, though I know nothing about the world in which these decisions are made.

This is why thrift store shopping has become such a symbol for independent thinking. A thrift store is the only place you can actually find things that express something other than "I'm wearing what everyone else is wearing." And when thrift stores sell "aubergine" it's retro and probably called "purple".