their PR is deluding you

we need an uncorrupted gap-loving fashionista

Angela Lindvall by Norbert Schoerner for Prada Fall 1998

Every year, New York Fashion Week churns out an explosion of content from already content-infested waters. The who’s who of the glamorous industries flock to New York’s buzzy cocktail bars and luxury warehouse venues like a bi-annual migration of eels to Sargasso. 

Which puts me to mind: until about two years ago, we had no idea how eels were mating—we knew that they came from the dark crevices of international waters and made a bafflingly instinctual migration to the Sargasso Sea, where they mated once, and died. (It turns out the females just shoot out a million eggs and the males fertilize them in space.)

Marine biologists wondered how these creatures multiplied with the same fervor that I wonder about NYFW: who are these people, how did they get here, and how the Fuck are they affording their outfits?

While there are a dozen think pieces surfacing about the death of NYFW, as they do every time it rolls around, (here’s one I read on Cultured), the envy of it is as alive as ever. This occurred to me as I was browsing the NYFW looks of one very chic Substack style influencer—who will remain nameless because she is, frankly, doing her job—giving us the rundown on her outfits and their price points. Each outfit was averaging out to be between $5-7k. I know for certain that at least one of the heavily featured brands she was repping gave her a healthy clothing allowance as well as some gifted items. Which is to say: at least $2k of that outfit she’s coaxing us to buy—standing there in a mirror selfie as if it’s completely sensible to spend $385 on a midi skirt, and $780 on a pair of shoes—was free to her.

I’ve been struggling to openly endorse this new movement in fashion, which is all about careful consumption, slow fashion, Pieces Made To Last, because such content is being advertised to me by women with quadruple or quintuple my disposable income, or promotional brand relationships that render payment moot. I remember working at a magazine where the Editor-in-chief received a couple free babaas and then posted about how they were all she could wear for fall. A single babaa sweater is $275+. And I love babaa! It’s an amazing brand—carefully sourced, beautifully designed, minimal environmental impact and made from materials with longevity. It’s also completely out of my price point. A $300 sweater?? I make $62k a year….as do some of you….like Y’all!!! ! WE MUST WAKE UP!!!

I was eating up

Emilia Petrarca

’s piece for The Cut where she plays Would You Rather, pitting $59,000 for a 3-D Louis Vuitton dress against $59,000 to “book a 125-person wedding at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Palm House on a Saturday in November minus the facility-rental fee and vendor meals.”

thecut

A post shared by @thecut

It led me to deduce the following—

There are two culprits for our modern financial illness:

1. We’ve normalized an insane price point for clothing, have allowed magazines and influencers and brands to convince us that it’s more than reasonable to spend $800 on a trench coat.

2. The people selling us the aforementioned exorbitantly expensive clothing did not, themselves, purchase it. That was, in fact, free.

While it’s enviable to receive comped product or “PR” and advertise yourself as someone with clout and covetable relationships to luxury brands, it’s even more enviable to suggest you had the money to pay for those pieces in full—that yours is such a life that you can afford several pairs of boots from the Aeyde winter drop. The result being: socials lead us to consume a lot of women with wardrobes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and consequently believe that we, too, are supposed to have a wardrobe resembling that—or at least treating ourselves occasionally to expensive pieces that “elevate” our style. We forget that where we’re spending $170 for “the perfect white tee,” a “must-have basic,” they spent $0.

While writing for Coveteur, I ascertained the way PR is going about their outreach is chaotic—they’re pulling from out-of-date email lists, hitting up fringe freelancers without much editorial pull at all. Haven’t you at least once wondered to yourself, while watching a girl from your high school with 900 Instagram followers unbox the new line of Maison Louis Marie: how the hell is she getting PR?

I was receiving things far out of my ability to review, combing through dozens of PR emails a day, and I was only writing occasionally for Coveteur at the time. I got a literal Dyson sent to me. Which, obviously, rocks for me and I love that thing more than I’ve ever loved a piece of technology, but it most certainly did not get a write-up in Coveteur. Dyson handed over $600 worth of product to a girl from central Virginia with 500 Substack subscribers only to flame them later for their approach.

With every package that arrived on my doorstep, I felt a little more desensitized to luxury goods, a little more skeptical of how I was being encouraged to spend my money, and what was being deemed “worth the hype.” I was gifted products that were…bad…ineffectual, insane-smelling, dermatitis-provoking. I felt a pressure to post about them anyway, and while I did not, I can of course empathize with anyone who might, in order to maintain a positive relationship with a brand, or get their check, or receive more PR from other, better brands. This sort of guilt-ridden consumer relationship led me to confirm a hunch I’d had previously: things were being “endorsed” as worthy products that were not, in fact, worthy of endorsement. And the lifestyle being sold to me was not actually being purchased by those with that lifestyle, it was arriving free of charge by UPS.

I won’t beat a dead horse about the way social media makes us sick and envious (duh), but it most certainly deludes us of our finances. I caught myself this week considering how much I could spend on a proper brown suede bag for my new fancy job, looking at $600 and $800 bags with much too heavy a hand considering that new job will pay me $75k. But, Jesus, everyone has this bag. Everyone being all the girls I follow on Instagram, all the Tik Tok fit checks, all the girls posting chic six-panel galleries on Substack of their fall outfits.

The change of seasons, particularly our foray into fall, is always a bank account death sentence. Suddenly, a wardrobe that we’ve credit carded to cultivate barely 60% of our desired aesthetic becomes largely irrelevant. And even the influencer content we consume about how to repurpose our spring things for fall requires that we have any of the gorgeous spring things in the first place. Suddenly we’re a season and half behind and frantically searching for a “transitional trench.”

The issue is not necessarily the brand-PR-influencer relationship itself—it’s an inspired way to sell product—but its deceptive nature. We lose touch with which closets have been mostly gifted, we normalize them. After a certain point, we’ve seen so much Miu Miu online that we feel it must be odd that we don’t have any Miu Miu. We suppose everyone else has decided to bite the bullet and drop a thousand on a “staple pair.” 

And the thing I’m really wrestling with—I was speaking about this last night with my friend Carly who writes

idée fixe

, a brilliant fashion sustainability newsletter—is how can I be a responsible, stylish consumer while making a regular-to-modest salary, and spending like I make a regular-to-modest salary? Where is that road map?

Because the hell of it is that even our beloved allies, our trusted influencers touting an Old Navy cardigan as best of the bunch this season, are then located by Favorite Daughter and gifted $400 sweaters. They aren’t wrong to take them! Ask for three color varieties! Live what we wish to live! Dress as we wish to dress! But one by one, we lose our allies to the glamor of a comped closet.

Let this note be a lighthouse among this very chic storm: we have to get a grip. These beautiful people are not paying for their outfits—even the micro-celebrities are not, as Us Weekly tells us, Just Like Us. 

Thanks It's From eBay

&

Total Rec

are my guiding lights—amazing taste, always looking for a true deal, reminding me that this obsessive moment with personal style is about finding the look of things that reflect your sensibilities, locating what doesn’t fall apart, and otherwise de-influencing me all the time to drop $1k on anything besides a plane ticket.