Please stop telling me what to buy
Why it feels like every fashion newsletter is just spitting out shopping recs—and how to avoid becoming a 'zombified shopbot.'
Not that long ago, I’d read fashion newsletters for the unique, opinionated kind of insight you don’t always see in conventional mainstream media. I loved the unique takes on personal style and getting dressed, and absorbing all the interesting, provocative approaches to covering popular trends, celebrities, or big fashion moments. I used to read fashion newsletters for the fashion.
Now every Substack arriving in my inbox seems like a shopping round-up. 10 Things To Buy This Season … 6 New Closet Essentials … The 8 Best Things I Bought Last Month … Or something super clickbait-y like, Every Item On This List Is On Sale!
It’s all much too much. Too many lists, too many tabs, too many too many mindless Shopify transcations, and packages with forgotten contents arriving. We’re becoming an army of screen-glazed shopbots.
Look, I’m not saying I don’t enjoy shopping. I do. And I’d be fooling only myself to pretend we don’t live in a capitalist, consumerist-driven society. But the constant churn, and the sheer volume of shopping round-ups makes the experience of acquisition—which can offer a truly exhilarating moment when the circumstances are right—feel pre-programmed, and almost robotic. Hence, shopbots.
I’ve definitely had my share of these moments, especially when I find myself mindlessly scrolling for any visible links to click on, without considering any of the things I normally when when browsing the racks IRL: Do I like this? How would this look on me? What would I wear it with? Does the price seem worthwhile?). Instead, I’m lost in an abyss of open tabs, scanning page after page of things I don’t need or even really want (but for some reason feel I need to know about), and often buying something on impulse because it’s available in my size, or the least expensive or most whatever of the bunch—often forgetting what I actually paid for until it arrives a few days later. I call this fugue-like behavior ‘zombie shopping.’
Of course there are some clear-headed, worthwhile exceptions to the rule. I highly recommend the well-researched, informative newsletters by former editors and savvy fashion insiders like Becky Malinsky, Laurel Pantin, Diana Tsui, and Laura Reilly, who genuinely know their shit from their Shein. These women are pros.
They nicely balance their expertise in styling and wardrobe-building with shopping suggestions, and more often than not, I come away from their newsletters with original ideas and inspiration around things I already own. And if one of their newsletters does compel me to buy a new piece I’m excited about, it’s rarely regrettable. In fact, it’s often pretty gratifying because I have the intentional experience of actually shopping for that item. What does the intentional experience of shopping even mean? It’s shopping with purpose: either seeking something or the ‘idea’ of something out, and then, making the conscious choice to buy X, versus Y and Z (for whatever reasons). In other words, it’s the opposite of zombie shopping, shopbotting, whatever you want to call it. As the consumer, you’re forced out of your fugue state to make actual decisions based on your own subjective criteria. How novel!
Why the prevalence of all these shopping newsletters? I’d say that it’s largely because recommendation newsletters in general tend to land well: Cook This Easy Recipe; Listen To This New Podcast Series; Read This Great To New Book That Everyone Will Be Talking About; Watch That Great Book’s Adapted Tv Series On Hulu.
And when it comes to shopping Substacks specifically, everyone’s trying to get in on a paycheck—however pithy at first—from earning affiliate dollars and sponsorships, to advertorials, and then of course there’s the price of subscriptions. There’s a frenzied business around shopping. It’s growing, and it’s not surprising that it’s growing.
But then there’s so much getting erased in this centrifugal paradigm of shopping, including a sense of personal authorship in our style choices: what clothes we buy to build our wardrobes, and how we decide to wear them. A Blackbird Spyplane newsletter from last month describes this subset of fashion victim as someone who’s “stuck in a State of Shopping.”
If you look like you relate to clothes primarily as a consumer — as a walking credit-card-information auto-fill, that is, as opposed to, e.g., an appreciator, self-expresser and exquisitely fitted life-liver — then what you’re broadcasting about yourself is not that you have taste, or a cool eye, or a sly sense of humor, or a meaningful connection to a piece, or a smolderingly hot aura, or anything else interesting. No!! What you are expressing, instead, is the boring non-message, “I bought new clothes.”
Blackbird’s writer Jonah Weiner goes on to call out the emphasis placed on “rank commerce” and how neutering it can be to our actual style personalities. If people start to call you a Ssense girl, or align you with any widely-known retail brand, then you’re in trouble.
So what’s the fix? For starters, be a little defiant. Stop buying what everyone else is telling you to buy, and instead try a ‘soft no’ on for size. A ‘soft no’ is essentially a ‘no’ that has the potential to become a ‘yes,’ but it impels you to go through the internal motions of debating whether or not a new pair of Gucci platform loafers merits the ‘yes.’ Force the item to make a legit case for itself, or practice some other kind of mental roadblock—like a 24-hour waiting period—that requires you to take a beat before the zombie state sets in.
Remember the thrill of the hunt—that frisson of excitement you get when you happen to be in an actual store, and you’re not sure what you’re looking for, but you’ll know it when you find it? You can also get that from shopping your own closet. Start in the way back, and work your way forward. Chances are, you’ll come across something you forgot you owned, and maybe even have some updated ways to style it in mind. Or, when you really need/want to add a specific thing to your wardrobe—a boxy wool blazer a la Saint-Laurent, Fall 2023, for example—poke around for some vintage options. See what’s already out in the world, instead of stoking the demand for more newness. The retail industry is a dumpster fire of unused garments, so why not try to shrink the pile a bit—and with something more unique, too? If you’re buying into the idea that you need a single thing on anyone else’s shopping list to look cool, then you’ve already paid too much.