Last December, I went on a date with a man I’ll call Gabe. We met where I had nearly all dates in my early Seattle days: a coffee shop at the top of the stairs near Golden Gardens. The agenda was simple—get a tea, walk down the towering staircase to the beach, and then depending on the quality of the conversation, either turn around and huff up the 1,000 steps (it wasn’t a perfect plan) or return by looping back the long way through the charming Sunset Hill neighborhood.
It started out well. He was clean, wore glasses, and didn’t go in for the hug unmasked. Whatever, my qualifications have gotten pretty low in Ye Olde Plague. Also, he was wearing a New Yorker tote. A good sign, I thought.
After buying our drinks, we headed down to the beach. I warmed my hands on my Rooibus tea and he told me that he’d just gotten hot water since he couldn’t take his Invisalign out. Cool cool cool cool…Didn’t he know were were going to go on a date? But listen, I’m trying to be more open minded. We’d made it to the water by then and it couldn’t have been fifteen minutes into the date when I asked Gabe one of my go-to date questions. “So,” I asked, “what do you like to read?” To which he replied, “Oh, I don’t read much.” Confused, I asked, “But you read the New Yorker, right?” and pointed to tote slung over his shoulder at that very moment. And do you know what he said next? “Oh, I just subscribed for the tote.”
HE JUST SUBSCRIBED FOR THE TOTE.
The horror!
It’s one thing to enjoy the free tote. I have the same one! Literally everyone in Brooklyn seems to have it. But to admit it so blasé, so “oh this isn’t a thing!” I can’t. That is not a cheap tote, my friend. Normally, a subscription runs well over a hundred dollars a year. So, what, he got this piece of fabric simply to show that he is a person who probably reads the very magazine he advertises on his body? (Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised since on date two [yes, Reader, I somehow went on a second date with him, I’m already judging me for the both of us] it came out that on nights when he was drunk, he exclusively wanted to kiss men and wear dresses. Oh and also that regularly shoplifted candles from West Elm. All power to him exploring his sexuality—though it seemed I might not be the right date choice for him—but good lord, nicking candles from West Elm? I said, “I think Nighttime Gabe is trying to tell you something,” and then ended the date.)
Anyway, I digress from the tote. Why did Gabe do this? I think he did it because it’s become normal to signify intellectualism with the things we wear. It makes me think of this paparazzi photo of Phoebe Bridgers and Paul Mescal. They’re wearing the “cool kid” outfits of Gen Z-ers and Millennials du jour, aka, they look like it’s laundry day and the paps caught them out. After learning they were a couple, I looked them up, wanting to see that chain-wearing heartthrob from Normal People in real life love. What caught my eye first was Phoebe’s hat, a yellow Paris Review baseball cap.
It seems to me that there’s something important about one of today’s biggest indie stars making sure it’s known that she reads the Paris Review. Is this the contemporary Calvin Klein logo of the 90s or Seven jeans of the 00s? In the Vox article “The great American cool” by Safy Hallan-Farah, she gets right to the heart of this behavior: “Our tastes…lend themselves to the delusion of uniqueness. Today, our particular likes are even more than a shorthand for an identity, they are the identity itself.” Following this logic, wearing a Paris Review hat says “My identity is the rare breed who is literary enough to go beyond NPR and the New Yorker.”
I’m not immune to wanting to be known via my wearable possessions. The other day, before seeing Phoebe’s cap, I went to the Paris Review website and got this pop up:
And you know what my first thought was? No cynicism, just genuine dismay, like “Wait, I could have gotten a Paris Review tote with my subscription?!” I felt cheated of the chance to publicly display my love of that thick-papered journal—or, realistically, to show that I am someone who subscribes to the Paris Review. The tote (or the hat, as in Phoebe’s case) has become irrelevant to whether I actually read it or not.
The brands we wear have always been class signifiers, but recently I’ve become more aware of signs pointing directly at intellectualism. Access to education—and even books themselves—was long restricted to the rich, so perhaps a Paris Review tote not being that far away in terms of what it represents monetarily from a Deerfield shirt and an ivy-covered mansion in Connecticut.
I have a theory that this particular trend is related to the way books on social media are often posted as proof of readerliness without any attention to what is actually written in those books. Is it cool to use a tote to make people think you are a type of person you are not? How regularly must one read the New Yorker to qualify as a legitimate tote wearer? I have a big guilt stack like anyone. At what point does the signifier (the tote) get completely detached from the signified (literariness)?
I’d love to hear your thoughts about the these types of wearable literary signifiers. Where do you see this playing out? What signifiers of intellectual “uniqueness” do you notice on social media or off-screen?