It Rhymes with Farrah and I Don't Shop There.
Except when I do.
I enter Zara the way I assume married men enter brothels. Eyes straight ahead, no eye contact. I am not like these people. They’re here because they don’t know better, while I, of course, do. This is fast fashion at its worst. It’s environmentally unfriendly. The quality is questionable. It’s better to buy a few good things than a lot of cheap ones. Yes, yes, I know. In fact, this is my last time. And I’m not buying - just doing a quick loop. In and out. Definitely not trying on.
I’m only here because I’m at Hudson Yards, the shopping mall you end up in if you walk the length of the High Line and need a hit of air conditioning and a restroom. Since I’m on the phone with my sister, I walk around, passing the luxury stores on the first floor - Dior, Bulgari, Fendi - empty, empty, empty.
I keep talking as the escalator takes me to the second floor, where everyone who can’t afford Dior is buying iced coffee at Blue Bottle. My sister, who’s a gynecologist, is telling me about a shortage of estrogen patches and I make a mental note to renew my prescription. I tell myself I’m only heading up to the next floor since their restrooms are less crowded than the first. And then walk right past the restroom.
Finished with estrogen, I’m now mid-gossip with my sister when I see the sign - “60% off Sale.”
“I have to go, Kar,” I say, as if something urgent has come up.
I poke my head in - literally, just my head, and look both ways as if to cross a street. I enter. I touch the fabric of a dusty pink dress and keep walking. I don’t need a thing. This will be easy. Except that it won’t. It never is. Oh my god. I love embroidered gauzy tops in summer. When I was a teenager, we called them Indian tops, whether they were from India or not. Sometimes we called them peasant tops, a name I liked, since I fancied myself a peasant girl - a dreamy, thoughtful sort who did macrame and baked whole wheat bread, a girl with a strong, kind boyfriend who played guitar and rode a motorcycle.
The hippie tops seem to be everywhere. I touch one and hear myself say “oh my god.” It’s so pretty. And at 60%… I gasp. This lovely top can be mine for $20. And so can this, and this one, for $15! Before I know it, I’m in the fitting room, downright giddy in my bra and panties. These tops are the tops. I picture one with white jeans, another over a bathing suit, a third with my favorite flowy pants.
I’m about to check out when I notice yet another pretty thing. This one is white with a periwinkle floral pattern, and, fueled by my fitting room triumphs, I throw it onto the pile. Who can blame me? I’ve gone gauzy.
The next day, I’m at the Zara on lower Fifth, looking to return the floral top, which has turned out to be more Golden Girl than Cool Girl. The place is packed and I grimace at the Returns line. Deciding to save it for another day, I head toward the door.
As I exit, a woman whose head is buried in a rack of dresses is tapped on the shoulder. She turns to face the tapper. Her eyes widen.
“What are you doing here?” She shakes her head with wonder, as if they’ve run into each other at a market in Marrakesh.
The tapper laughs. “I know, right? I never shop here, but this sale…”
“Yeah, yeah,” I think. No one ever shops here. I don’t either. Neither do the hundred women darting around, grabbing hangers from racks like it’s 2020 and they’ve found rolls of toilet paper at CVS.
“What are you doing here?”
After a couple of seconds of awkward laughter and more head shaking, the tappee changes the subject. She mentions an upcoming work meeting, to both their relief.
I understand their embarrassment, of course. It’s not because the prices are low - snagging a bargain is a badge of honor, especially amongst those who don’t need to. How many women have gotten great joy saying, “Barney’s Warehouse Sale,” when asked where a beautiful top came from? A steal at The Real Real or snagging a pair of Gucci slides “for nothing” at Century 21 makes people feel smart.
But let’s face it -no one wants the label that peeks out from their shirt to say Zara.
Years ago, when my ad agency had a luxury brand as a client, I became very conscious of labels - mainly because I barely owned any. The clients, on the other hand, exuded the kind of confidence and ease that comes with owning good things.
“Oh, thank you. It’s one of my oldest pieces,” they’d say when someone (usually me) commented on what they were wearing.
Pieces. Jesus. My wardrobe didn’t have pieces. It had me in pieces. Most mornings, I tore through my closet like a whirling dervish, saying “No, no, no,” shoving dresses from left to right, then back again. But for the time being, I was faking it with simple dresses, my one pair of Stuart Weitzman shoes and a pair of good boots. I was holding my own. Until, a few weeks in, when we were introduced to their in-house creative director.
T, unlike the others, didn’t wear minimalist Jil Sander and she wasn’t demure. She had dark hair with streaks of premature grey, knew her way around a smoky eye and had a style unlike anyone else’s. She wore voluminous tops with exaggerated sleeves, and often, a swath of fabric wrapped like a sarong, over her slim pants. I could never tell if the sarong-thing was part of the pants or separate, and that was part of her ingenious style. T was just plain fabulous. She was the picture of studied indifference; so comfortable with high fashion that she carried it casually, like a bouquet of elegantly drooping tulips.
Once, during a meeting, when she slipped her arms out of her blazer and let it fall to the back of her chair, I noticed the label. Balenciaga. She wore fur-lined Gucci mules, one of which always seemed to be dangling from a foot when she crossed her legs - an ease with luxury attainable only by those who are used to it. Slim bangles slid down her arms when she gestured. She loved good scotch. I coveted her bad-girl vibe and studied her style during meetings, knowing it was a test I’d never pass.
A few months into my stint as a luxury writer, I went to Zara to do a return. Not to buy. The merry-go-round of buying and returning had become less merry. I’d been upping my game - scouring The Outnet and The Real Real for good pieces (pieces!) buying timeless basics from Everlane and handbags from Cariuma. It all felt so smart. So grown up. So clean.
Yet here I was, back in the den. The place was chaotic. A rack of dresses faced the door and I walked past it, my eyes trained forward, like a newly sober person entering a bar. As I walked toward the register, a subtly-ruffled neckline seemed to flutter at me - “just a touch, sweetie - you don’t have to buy.” Hating myself, I felt my pulse quicken. I touched the ruffle, which was light as air - pretty, sexy, fun air. A shock to my newly-streamlined system. Oh God, I wanted this dress. And it was only $10 more than the top I was returning.
The hanger draped from my finger as I walked to the register. I could always change my mind. And there would be time to do that - a line had formed the way it always did.
I sighed. The line didn’t move and it was easy to see why. The customer at the register had dumped a huge pile of clothes onto the counter and was looking at her phone as the sales person, slowly - why rush? - looked at each item, retagged it and hung it up.
“One register for all these people?” I said to the line in general. Most people were lost in their phones but one woman had clearly been waiting for someone to voice what she felt so deeply.
“I know, right?” she said, with a level of anger and eye contact I regretted bringing out.
I glanced around as if I’d just spotted a dress that required intense concentration. And there. Taking a shirt from a rack, holding it up, studying it as if it mattered - was T.
I may as well have spotted Mick Jagger. My mouth hung open. I grabbed my phone.
I’m at Zara and guess who’s here? I texted a colleague.
After a beat, I answered for her. T!!!!!!
I smiled as I waited for her reply.
She’s probably shopping for her daughter.
My bubble burst into the air - which at that moment, was being spritzed with Zara fragrance by a 10-year-old. My sense of validation was immediately crushed. T shopped for her 12-year-old at a store where I shopped for myself. Of course. Tween clothing doesn’t have to be made to last, nor does it need to be timeless. I became impatient, muttering that the line hadn’t moved an inch.
I risked another glance in T’s direction. She was studying an olive green shirt, holding its sleeve out, examining a ruffle at the cuff. The perfect ruffle for a 12-year-old girl, I thought, shame cascading over me. But then. She held it to her shoulders. Turned this way and that. Studied herself in the mirror. After a second, she nodded the way she did when she loved a layout. Oh my God - it was for her!
She was - at least at that second - like me!
Still, once I left the store, I was glad she didn’t see me and wondered whether she’d have been embarrassed by the encounter. I decided she wouldn’t have. For people like T, mixing high and low fashion was just part of the fun. For people like me, high fashion was a seasoning, and one I could only afford to use sparingly, like saffron.
As I walked home, I thought about how I’d often coveted the exaggerated ruffles of T’s sleeves during meetings. I’d fancied them to be Alexander McQueen, which they certainly could have been.
But!
They could also have been Zara. I didn’t have the kind of eye that could tell the difference. I knew she could. But sometimes I wondered about the whole “good eye” thing.
Maybe it doesn’t matter that much.
Lately, I shop less because I need less.
I rarely go to Zara.
But I can’t deny the heart flutter of a 70% off sale.
Maybe we all have a little Zara in us?
And maybe we should forgive each other - and by each other, I mean ourselves. And stop the shaming.
After all.
We’re only human.
And who amongst us doesn’t get a little gauzy once in a while?
