Acquiring Minds

Jamie Gavigan, who owns some $20,000 worth of Manolo Blahnik shoes, models her $2,300 satin Gucci dress. (Photograph by Kyoko Hamada)

She stops at a jewelry display long enough to admire a charm bracelet that costs $6,400 without the charms. Then she picks up a pair of $720 pink patent leather ankle boots that zip up the side and have a silver toecap. "The pink boots are pretty cute," she says. "They were in a lot of magazines." She asks the salesclerk whether the boots have to be special-ordered. No, the clerk says. But the boots, which arrived in the store only two weeks before, are almost completely sold out already.

"We only have size 11 left," the clerk says. "J. Lo was photographed wearing them."

This is the story of the American economy for the last 100 years: Just as fast as manufacturers figured out how to make new products, consumers figured out they wanted them.

"One hundred years from now people will look back and say, How did they survive without all the great things we have now?" says Kevin Murphy, a free-market economist who teaches at the University of Chicago. "You never want to say that everything that could be demanded has been demanded. People are going to want more and more as opportunities grow. That's progress."

When consumer confidence is high, the econ-omy booms. When con- sumer confidence falls, the economy tanks. So consumerism, the exuberant engine of our prosperity, is good for us, right?

Twitchell, who has written books in praise of consumerism, thinks so -- and not just because it's all that's staving off massive unemployment. A society where rank can be purchased as easily as a Louis Vuitton key chain is fair, at least to shoppers who can come up with the 80 bucks.

"The global village is not quite the city on the hill, not quite the Emerald City, and certainly not quite what millennial utopians had in mind," Twitchell says, "but it is closer to equitable distribution of rank than what other systems have provided."

But that doesn't mean shopping makes us happy. Robert Lane, author of The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, is pretty certain that it doesn't. Plot a chart with two lines, he says, one representing the U.S. GDP per capita from 1940 to 1990 and the other indicating the percentage of people who described themselves to pollsters as "very happy." The lines run in opposite directions. While there are no limits, it seems, to the kinds of goods our economy can produce and people will buy, the time and energy focused on highly individualistic consumption is time not spent on building the relationships more likely to yield longer-term gratification, Lane argues.

Shopper's disappointment is a hot topic of academic study. Anticipating certain purchases allows modern consumers to imagine themselves lifted out of their ordinary lives and delivered into a kind of enchanted world, some social theorists say. But actually buying the coveted item never really satisfies the longings, at least not for long. Rather than ask why they bought these darn things in the first place, shoppers try to make themselves feel better by buying again. The cycle repeats itself until consumers' houses are stuffed with things they don't really need and no longer want. Yesterday's purchases. Then they go to the Container Store or Hold Everything to buy extra storage -- and hand over the plastic once again.

The desire to acquire can lead to crushing debt. The credit card debt of the average American family increased by 53 percent from 1989 to 2001, according to a study released earlier this year by a nonpartisan public policy group called Demos: A Network for Ideas and Action. For middle-class families, the increase was 75 percent. Savings rates declined steadily, and personal bankruptcies rose 125 percent. Last year 1.6 million Americans declared personal bankruptcy, an all-time high. A society that focuses more on quality of stuff than on quality of life spawns a kind of moral bankruptcy as well, critics like Juliet Schor charge. We get plenty of nice cars and clothes, but not enough quality education, arts, recreation and mass transportation, she contends. Cocooning trumps community commitment, fairness and personal meaning.

So shopping is really bad for us, right?

Christine Kelley Cimko isn't an aca-demic who has studied shopping, but she's an expert on the topic. Her colleagues at her public relations firm call her the ambassador of Chanel-istan.

Cimko, who is 51, owns so many Hermes scarves and classic designer shoes and handbags that they fill three closets. She knows she doesn't need any more. But she keeps shopping. And she takes pleasure in knowing that all these elegant things, these artifacts of the good life, are hers. A military brat who moved often in childhood -- her father was once commandant of the Marines -- Cimko says filling her Burke home with things she loves gives her a sense of security and continuity. She's puzzled that her 28-year-old daughter doesn't embrace the joys of consumerism; in fact, she wants to join the Peace Corps.

Cimko would rather shop the world. She adores the black satin handbag she bought in Paris on her 50th birthday, but it's not her favorite. "This is my treasure," she says, fondling a gold quilted Chanel handbag. "It's my little Holy Grail."

"I call this my rich bitch bag," she says, holding another glossy bag with a heavy gold chain as a strap and a gold clasp shaped like a seashell. "If you look at pictures of Lee Radziwill, Jackie and Babe Paley in New York in the 1960s, they always had a bag like this with a scarf tied around it."

Cimko can afford these luxuries. She's a senior vice president at Edelman, head of the public relations firm's image and international affairs division. She leaves her home by 7 a.m. weekdays, doesn't return home for at least 14 hours, and routinely travels overseas. When the pressure gets to be too much and she's feeling worn out, she has a network of salespeople who help to rejuvenate her.

"You have your lady at Neiman Marcus, and you have your lady at Saks," she says. "You have your guy at Nordstrom, and you have the lady at the cosmetics counter who calls you when they are having a facial event. It's almost like going out into another world where you feel comfortable. You have this little world that grows up around you, of people who are almost taking care of you. They are meeting your needs, finding those shoes in your size or making sure that when the Chanel bag comes in in beige you get the call."

But when her shopping network fails to meet her needs, it hurts. For 20 years she'd been cleansing and moisturizing her porcelain skin with products by a company called La Prairie. Some of the products cost more than $300 for a small jar. When her La Prairie salesclerk telephoned one day to offer Cimko a private consultation with a visiting vice president of the cosmetics firm, she felt special. But when she had to wait long past the appointed hour, she was livid. She took her business elsewhere for good. "It's almost like I was betrayed by her," Cimko says.

She felt much the same when her new Mercedes stalled repeatedly, stranding her. She insisted on returning the car to the dealership. She didn't want it anymore. "I lost confidence in that car," she says. "It let me down."

As much as she enjoys her fashion luxuries, she's not sure the critiques of consumerism are off base. "It's either leading us down the sybaritic road of ancient Rome where all people wanted was pleasure, or it's inspiring people to work very hard to achieve the things they have. You sort of have to say, is that the be-all and end-all? I don't know the answers to those questions. Those weren't questions I was asking myself when I was sleeping on J.C. Penney sheets, driving a Nissan and working so hard all those years to get where I am now. But where does it end? Does it end?"

Boxes begin arriving at the salon a few days after Jamie's shopping trip to New York. Hector has delivered the Gucci black dress, the white blouse and the skinny skirt along with a few jackets she didn't request, but he thought she might like. Ben has sent the Manolo Blahnik brown suede pumps, the cognac boots and the silver evening sandals with the emerald-cut rhinestones. He has sent the size 381/2 sandals that Jamie worried were too small. Cameron Diaz is not giving up those size 39s. Jamie slips the sandals on again and decides they fit just fine. She tallies her purchases, which come to more than $5,000, and decides to return the cognac Manolo Blahnik boots. You can't have everything, she says with a shrug.

Two days later, Jamie spends the morning in court, getting her final divorce decree. She sits waiting for the judge to call her name and listening to other people's heartaches: the man who can't afford a lawyer, the woman who's fled with her children. She's come to court alone, but she's used to that. As a chef, her husband worked so many late nights that she's felt like a single parent for much of the time anyway. After they split, he moved to New York. Some days she fights back panic that she's raising her child alone. But sitting in court she feels calm. This ending, she says later, seemed inevitable.

That night at home, as she gets dressed up to go out, she feels pretty good. She's planned a divorce party of sorts, a night out with girlfriends at Cafe Milano, the Georgetown hot spot where the rich and the hip gather to eat, drink and ogle one another. It's a "preview night," which is what Jamie calls her first night out on the town wearing a new item of clothing or pair of shoes. The restaurant will be her red carpet.

The place is thick with smoke and air kisses by the time Jamie and her friends arrive around 9 p.m. One of her companions causes a stir with a glam-rock metallic halter top that flashes in the dimness, luring both men and women to reach out and touch it. "Concentrate on me, not her," one man orders his transfixed girlfriend.

A European woman of a certain age, dressed in sleek black designer clothes and carrying what appears to be a black Birkin bag, looks like a champion shopper. But she doesn't sound happy. She corners another woman in the ladies' room to lament that she lives in an Arlington high-rise that's home to thousands of people, but she hasn't met a single one. "It's a concrete hell, I tell you," the older woman says, "a concrete hell."

Jamie struts through Cafe Milano head high. This is the moment she's been shopping for. She's wearing a brown leather miniskirt so tiny it could fit on one of the restaurant's dinner plates, a midriff-baring brown turtleneck and the short Michael Kors leather bomber jacket lined with shearling.

"Excuse me, excuse me," says a man who eagerly trots after her. "I love that outfit. Are you from L.A.?"

Jamie, looking as beautiful and unattainable as any movie star, just keeps moving. On her feet are a pair of brown suede Manolo Blahnik pumps. On her face is a smile of satisfaction.

April Witt is a Magazine staff writer. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.