Saturday, November 27, 2004

Reflections on post-Thanksgiving shopping

Why does American Apparel sell "organic" thongs, and who's the intended audience? ("Girls Gone Wild," the New England liberal arts school edition?)

Why do all pictures accompanying news stories of post-Thanksgiving shoppers show only the most grotesque and disheveled of the bargain-hunters? Sure, a horde of people entering a mall at 5 in the morning in search of bargains are unlikely to all be clones of Nan Kempner, but I seriously think a special effort is taken by photographers to shoot only those who not only are bolting into a mall early in the morning, but look like they're the sort of people who'd do that.

What was so wrong with the pair of hot pink stretch-cords I tried on at Find Outlet? I was informed by my two trusty (and stylish) shopping companions that they were horribly unflattering, that they pulled in all the wrong places, but to me they looked fabulous. Could it have been skinny mirrors?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The NYT invites its more self-contained (and in smaller packages!) readers to consider the upstate shoppers as jokes or, at best, anthropological "others". Since the paper, purportedly a liberal institution, would not sink to an equivalent headline (e.g., "Grinning morons charge upstate mall"), it gets to portray, with a wink, a non-p.c. belief. It's this under-handedness that's so offensive.

Anonymous said...

find outlet is mad amazing. apparantly the one on 7th ave is better than the one in nolita but i havent been to that one. but i have gotten lots of cute things from find outlet.
lauren