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I had not been to Plaza Frontenac in quite some time, except to scurry in the Saks end to see a movie without pop or popcorn. For some sad, unfathomable reason, they no longer make concessions.
And neither do the stores.
My mom and I used to go to Frontenac regularly, especially for Neiman-Marcus’s 70 percent-off Last Call sale. She was a single mom on a secretary’s salary, yet we could afford a few carefully chosen items every year. And those clothes were so well made, the fabrics of such quality, that they lasted. Several are over forty and still going to parties.
Today, though? Even the sale prices make me gasp. All those triple digits! Under my breath, I report the news to my dead mother. We could never shop here now, Nette! A frivolous first-world complaint, but one that carries more weight than you think. The gap in pricing and quality, with few real sales at the top and so little in the middle that is beautiful and well-made, matches the widening gap in wealth. What it says is: do not bother aspiring. Do not dream that you could partake in even a little of this elegance. You are either in or out. You have, or you have not.
It is one thing to look at a price tag and sigh wistfully. If you love the garment fervently enough, you might even decide to save up and splurge. But it is another thing altogether to feel so shut out that you are tempted to bow in apology as you walk backwards out the door. How dared you enter? These are goods no one of your meager means can ever possess.
One can see how the French Revolution began.
My mother never controlled a fortune, but she was creative, watching what Audrey Hepburn wore in her movies and sewing fair copies for herself. She loved shopping at Frontenac—the quiet, the beauty and elegance, the courtesies, and the lack of pushy crowds all soothed her nervous system. She never would have dreamed that she had no right to be there. My grandmother insisted that everyone should learn manners and a little bit about every subject, enough to hold their own in conversation, and then feel entirely comfortable entering any part of society. Her mother came over from Ireland as a lady’s maid, and she learned “all the finer things”—in terms of manners and taste. The possessions themselves were irrelevant. As a result, our family has the bravado of Irish folk who starch and hang lace curtains in their hovels.
Today, though, even my formidable grandmother would be foiled. The bits of overlap, the little niches of surprise or largesse, have been scraped from the class system of our supposedly classless society. Nobody ever made that class thing clear. Yes, we are classless in the sense that no one writes social rules for us. We are, however, stratified. Not by pedigree but by how much cash we can wave about. Or how much bitcoin we can buy from the ATM-ish machine that now squats outside Neiman Marcus.
This system has never worked for the poor. Few systems do. But until the seventies, the U.S. economy did work for those of us in the (then vast) middle. The rich control the stock market and now, it would seem, the government, but it was middle-class energy that drove this country forward. The middle was the safe place that people born without wealth could climb toward. And once you reached the middle, you could enjoy a peek into the world of taste and luxury you did not inhabit. It was there to be gawked at, fantasized about, tried on—and in time, marked way down, so that every once in a while, the goods were spread around.
Nothing gets spread around anymore.
Oh, a designer dress might find its way online, but by then it is sweat-stained and rumpled. So much has gotten so expensive that those of us living between the poverty line and the portfolio either haunt thrift shops in good ZIP codes or buy crap that was made in an overseas sweatshop and will disintegrate after a few washings.
Frontenac tells other stories, too. Expanded men’s clothing departments and boutiques, because we seem to be headed back to the Baroque era when men gussied themselves up, primped and gazed into the mirror. Expanded offerings in athleisure—good God, is all of West County sweating in a gym? Hardly anything dressy in a way that demands a little planning and care.
Once again, Veblen was right. You find the same stretchy ease at Walmart. The lower and upper economic rungs have far more in common with each other than with the middle class, which still has to go to work. At jobs expected to disappear any minute.
We are watching the end of a peculiarly American dream. Oligarchy supplants democracy. Efforts to level prior advantage are dissolved, and favoritism makes a joke of the meritocracy that was supposed to replace them. The stable middle shrinks and wobbles. And the dream that was meant to instill healthy ambition is destroyed by excess ambition, excess wealth, excess power.
Even a little frivolous shopping has lost its fun.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
