Avis Cardella - Spent: Memoirs of a Shopping Addict

Copyright 2010 by Avis Cardella

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Little, Brown and Company

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First eBook Edition: May 2010

Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The author is grateful for permission to reprint material from

The Soul of the New Consumer by David Lewis and Darren Bridger,

Nicholas Brealey Publishing 2000, 2001.

ISBN: 978-0-316-08418-5

E2-20191106-PDJ-PC-DPU

For my mother and father

Spent is a work of nonfiction. Certain names and identifying details have been changed.

I used shopping to avoid myself. I used shopping to define myself. And at some point, I realized that I was no longer consuming; I was just being consumed. When I stood in the lingerie department of Barneys, flanked by rows of candy-colored Cosabella thongs and Ripcosa tank tops, and couldnt remember how I got there, I knew I was in trouble.

That was back at the turn of the millennium, when life couldnt have been better, but when I knew that something was going terribly wrong. Why was I standing in Barneys in a stupor? Why was I buying twenty pairs of underwear?

Can I help you? said the salesperson.

Yes, I want one in every color.

And then the walk home, the strange feeling of not wanting what I now had: twenty Cosabella thongs wrapped in whisper-thin tissue paper at the bottom of a black Barneys shopping bag.

I returned to my apartment and threw the bag in the back of the closet, where other discarded purchases were already marooned.

But, by all appearances, life was good. I was living in Manhattan and had a career as a freelance writer. I was engaged to a wealthy European businessman, and we had two homes, two cars, and an abundance of friends. My closet was full of beautiful things to wear, and there were all kinds of places to wear them.

It was the late 1990sthe age of irrational exuberanceand everyone was irrational; everyone was exuberant; everyone was shopping. Why not me? What could be wrong with that? Shopping almost felt mandatory in Manhattan. Just outside my front door was a veritable candy land: Tiffanys, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Manolo Blahnik, Bulgari, Takashimaya, Bonwit Teller, Prada, Linda Dresner, Emporio Armani, Tods, Nike, Burberrysand my three favorite department stores: Barneys, Bergdorfs, and Bloomingdales.

Let me give the geography because junkies are always concerned with logistics: Bergdorfs was the closest of my beloved retail fixes, about a six-minute walk from the luxury high-rise tower in which I lived. Barneys was next, about a ten-minute walk depending on the route Id take. Bloomingdales could be reached in fifteen minutes at a good clip.

Of the three, Barneys on Madison Avenue was the one I liked best. Barneys was modern, fresh, and white walled. Stepping into Barneys always felt a bit like boarding a spaceship. Sometimes I felt there was a distinct atmospheric change, a subtle barometric shift that seemed to occur in the small vestibule that led from the street to the store. Consequently, everything for sale at Barneys carried an aura of specialness, even otherworldliness. When I was strolling alone around Barneys, the world outside ceased to exist.

I could spend hours anchored in the shoe department. The salesman knew me by name. I knew his too. John had been selling me shoes for years. We first met when he was working at the downtown Barneys on 17th Street. It goes back that far, perhaps to the late eighties. He was always friendly and seemed to enjoy his job, but what he really wanted to do was bake cookies. I confided that I wanted to become a writer.

This is what happens when you spend a lot of time shopping: You get to know sales associates, and they get to know you. Sometimes you end up receiving handwritten notes in the mail, informing you of the arrival of a new collection or inviting you to a private sale. You get Christmas cards too.

At Bergdorfs I never knew anybody on the selling floor by name. I liked to float through the store and not speak. I felt intimidated there and slightly out of my league. Pretending to be born and bred Bergdorfs was something of a private fantasy for me. It must have been a New York thing. I didnt enjoy shopping at Bergdorfs as much as at Barneys, but Bergdorfs had an air of superiority. Even pushing my way through the heavy, gilded revolving door felt like an initiation rite. Getting my hair cut and colored on the light-filled top floor at the John Barrett Salon was the closest I ever came to feeling like the real deal: a Bergdorf blonde.

At Bloomingdales I could indulge my most secret self. I had a history at Bloomingdales because that is where I had shopped with my mother and where I could always return to dive into the folds of my past. As I came to realize, my shopping habit had deep roots. The memory of shopping with my mother is a touchstone.

I used shopping to avoid myself.

At the end of the twentieth century, as the Y2K bug was threatening to sour the big party, as New Yorks dot-com bubble was growing and Wall Street mavericks were riding roughshod through town, guns blazing, I was waking up from my big sleep, my stupor, my sidestepping grief.

Who was I?

I was a woman living in Manhattan. I was a creature with a cultivated appearance. Everything about me was carefully calibrated. Tips and cues were dictated by the pages of fashion magazines; I tried to follow them meticulously. My regimen included Pilates classes, yoga, and core fusion. The resulting body was taut and toned, rope muscled and fine. My skin also was polished and buffed like a brand-new automobile; it caught the light and glowed. This was the expensive appearance, the shoppers appearance, because shopping was an essential part of the lifestyle. If you didnt look the part, the sales associates wouldnt take you seriously. It was the acceptable appearance, because on any given day, as the sun came slanting down New Yorks grid of corridors, hundreds of women who looked just like me could be seen scampering to and fro clutching shopping bags.

Looking back, I realize that I must have joined that team as a sleepwalker. At the time, I had no recollection of how I got there. I only know that I awoke one day to find my closet filled with the right kinds of suitsPrada, Armani, Calvin Klein, Jil Sanderand the right kinds of shoes with heart-stabbing heels, the type that made my legs look just right, like magic. (Its all about illusion.) And in my bathroom cabinet, there were the right kinds of creams: the Laszlo Night Serum, the Crme de la Mer, the regenerating fluid, the Clinique soap, the vitamin C rejuvenating gel, the whitening toothpaste, and the amino acids with strange-sounding names.

I awoke one day with the realization that the only way I could have acquired all these accoutrements of the cultivated appearance was by having shopped for them. Therefore, I must have been shopping for a very long time.

So that is how, one glorious, sunny Tuesday afternoon, I found myself in Barneys and couldnt remember how I got there. Where I should have been was home finishing a story about the fashion photographer Michael Thompson. I had interviewed Thompson at a downtown studio where he was photographing Halle Berry for Revlon. It was my prize interview, hard-won from the clutches of another writer. But now the story was overdue, and I well, I was standing awestruck in the lingerie department.