The girl was blonde and had a nose-ring. I don’t remember exactly what clothes she wore; maybe a black dress. As I browsed the men’s racks, not really looking for anything- just idly flicking through various garments; she came up to me. She asked me how my day was.

My day was uh, ok, I said. Asking somebody how their day was is the normal thing to do, at establishments like this. At establishments that charge a small fortune for a jacket that looks slightly different to a hundred dollar jacket at the store across the road. I mean, if you’re going to sell your soul you might as well have nice customer service.

I mean- it wasn’t what she said, it was more the way she said it. It wasn’t a flirt exactly, but it had a certain lilt to it. You can count on the sales assistant at an expensive store for a fancy manner of speaking.

So nothing happened there. I just thought I’d mention it, because she was the most interesting part of the store. The menswear racks were populated by the sort of clothes that guys who need an “alt” or “intellectual” label that costs lots of money to justify their existence buy. Margiela- check. Raf Simons- check. Nom D- check (Nom D being the in-house label anyway. In New Zealand, it’s kind of famous for no apparent reason. The clothes are a synthesis of the dark elements of other designers: Martin Margiela, Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, etc. They’re nice clothes, but I feel like buying them is a bit like buying a really clever fake. Or a slice of cheesecake in a bakery that you know was your Grandma’s recipe that the goddamned bakery stole whilst she was out at Keita Takahashi’s knitting group.)

Whilst I’m writing all this, I’m listening to Bob Dylan’s “Modern Times”. It’s a weirdly clean album. Clean like a doctor’s surgery, or an Howard Hugh’s bathroom. The sound kind of dies- when a note is played, it’s gone forever. There’s no sense of distance, there’s not even a hint that maybe the A# the piano plays lives on elsewhere. It’s simply stopped, forever. The clothes here are like that too. They’re the sort of expensive that likes to be anonymous. If I were to purchase a jacket (I say jacket because that’s the majority of what they sell), like the girl with the nose-ring probably hopes, I’d be forever trying to justify it afterwards. I’d hand over my money or card, or note-holding-them-ransom, and feel the cliched sinking feeling. I’d go “Oh, fuck. What the fuck have you done Eden?”

“What the fuck have I done” is a recurring feeling when I buy clothes that I know are too expensive for what they are. I thought “What the fuck have I done” when I recently purchased a t-shirt. It’s a great t-shirt: white, with two collars creating a faux-sense of layers. There’s a picture in the corner that’s oddly saturated of a boy holding a kitten. I spent forty dollars on it. A t-shirt of a boy holding a kitten with two collars, no matter how great, is not worth forty dollars.

There’s a few distinctive pieces; although I don’t know if they even deserve to be called “pieces”. They’re most certainly clothes. There was this Raf Simons coat (regular readers will know how Mr. Simons recently gave possibly the worst collection of this year) that had an odd fabric, kind of lined. The tailoring was perfect, and it was very heavy. 960 dollars, I think. It was too big for me anyway. I suspect the wearer of the coat would eventually get back pains (”960 dollars for back pains? Man, you can get those for free!”)
I spotted a number (n)ine jacket that I’d seen last time I’d been there. It was green, had wooden toggle like things- rope attached to it like it was the lovechild of a sailor and a…..teenager.
I’d love to say something more glamorous. Lovechild of Marilyn Monroe. Lovechild of Andy Warhol. But the fabric’s the kind you find on an ordinary hoodie, or sweater. Cotton; thin, unremarkable. Fades easily.
Ah, but on the label it says Ten Percent Cashmere.
So I guess it’s luxury! Does this ten percent stop the fabric from feeling cheap? Nope.
I’d possibly buy it if it were in a better fabric. But I can’t get away from the idea of paying all this money for something that is essential a sweater with rope attached to it.

Actually- let’s be honest. It’d have to be a pretty amazing jacket for me to spend whatever godawful price they want for it. I saw a t-shirt by Martin “I don’t design anything anymore but don’t tell the kids that” Margiela. It was embroideredwith studs to create the effect of a waistcoat. One Thousand Dollars. One. Thousand. Dollars, for a t-shirt. It’s a very nice t-shirt, and I’m sure little old ladies spent many hours embroidering it. That t-shirt has been there for about a year.

There’s a wooden cabinet with dirty glass on the top, there’s a wallet by Margiela that’s made of 11 dollar bills (Subterranean Homesick Blues anybody?). It looks like a wad of cash with a clip in the middle. I’m actually, genuinely tempted to buy it. Somewhere I’ve got a couple of novelty calculators lying ’round: one looks like a note of cash, the other looks like a matchbox. They probably cost 20 cents at a garage sale or something. The wallet on the other hand probably costs a couple of hundred (if not more). I look over to the girl with a nose-ring, and almost say: “excuse me, how much does this cost?”
I don’t, because I know I won’t have much money to put in the wallet afterwards (and if I ask her “how much”, I’ll probably buy it. I’ve already spent enough money- before going to the shop I bought some books including Norwegian Wood and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of The World. I’ve been avoiding Norwegian Wood for a while now: it’s the Murakami book that every teenage girl with glasses has read, and every boy trying to get into that girl’s pants has read. It’s like listening to “Blonde on Blonde” and saying you know Bob Dylan, or listening to “Smells like Teen Spirit” and calling yourself a Nirvana fan. Well, at least the “Blonde on Blonde” listener has the endurance to listen to 71 one minutes and 23 seconds of the (then) sexiest man the The Universe. But you know, Norwegian Wood is pretty good!)

The women’s clothes fares better. They’re all black. I can’t describe them specifically, they’re just shrouds; shadow-like figures that I walk quickly past. That’s what this store sells really: shapeless dreams.