shopping, as a philosophy.

personal notes on taste, desire, and restraint.

So many conversations around shopping are depersonalized, focusing more on introducing a product and forgoing the deeper dive into why we’re so drawn to it. As in, what are the underlying patterns that help us to understand why something universally perceived as good, is actually good (to you vs. to me)? Let’s use the color red as an example. When red captivated us all last fall, my immediate thoughts were less about red’s broader resonance and more about the internal themes that red evokes on a personal level. Like, did your mom always have a red nail? Was red your imaginary friend’s favorite color? Is red prominent in your culture - drawing upon themes of home and belonging? This is what allows us to broaden our thoughts to consider the infinite layers creating synchronous desire. That’s my favorite thing about observing consumption – whether it’s food, homeware, clothes, or shoes. For me, it’s about finding the underlying patterns that strike a universal chord, elevating goods to broader cultural significance. 

Taste: a mirror of the stuff that makes you

My construction of taste, just like yours, is deeply personal. I was born in Zimbabwe, raised in the US, with family between three continents. Everyone was always traveling, in part, to see one another, but also with a keen interest in gaining and refining a broader perspective on the world. In that haze of constant exposure to culture that wasn’t acutely mine, or in the case of Zimbabwe, technically was (yet didn’t exactly feel like I had the right to claim)…I always had this fascination of observing and evaluating the balance of what makes us different yet the same. I had the coolest aunts and the coolest mom and was obsessed with Elle Woods and Destiny’s Child and the Spice Girls. I think that all created fertile ground for this wonder surrounding the women around me, the complexities of who we are, and what we desire (philosophically, girls-girl core). I distinctly remember being 7 in London and trying to figure out why so many women had sweaters over their shoulders, compared to the stiffer cotton skirts that I’d just seen on women in Nairobi. I’d spend weekends fawning over my aunts in their late twenties, who were engineers and girls in finance, wearing bebe and baguettes to clubs in nyc. 

So if it wasn’t clear already, I was a deeply precocious child, largely reinforced by my consumption of media (as we know, equally as important in shaping your worldview). In kindergarten, my preference was watching BBC with my grandfather vs any form of children’s programming. By the 3rd grade, I had discovered pop culture and Real Fashion: Vogue, J14, and reality television (a miss on my babysitter, who was definitely told that I was to read 3 books a week that summer). My super sweet sixteen and laguna beach were everything to me. That evolved to the real housewives by ~12 (jill zarin raised me), married against my first print subscription to WSJ (also at 12). There’s so much more to say about my becoming (I’m 28, so this isn’t a memoir LOL), but I share this to give you a sense of the threads that have woven my construction of taste. The relative output can change, but your taste is the constant thread of your life, evolving with your experiences and exposure, and general appetite towards things like risk vs security, etc. 

Over time, I’ve come to find that the expression of my taste, expressed via my likes and dislikes, is the lens through which I evaluate all things. Interestingly, and curious to know if you’re similar, resonance is communicated to me by an intense feeling of warmth in my gut – I just know when I know. However, I was also taught about the rigor of employing practicality at a very young age (like when my parents told me I couldn't keep ordering market-price lobster at every restaurant when I was 11… to be clear, loved how lobster looked on a plate, but never really liked the taste.… I was simply doing it all for the vibe). Through many lessons, I’ve developed an almost instantaneous connection between my gut and my mind. Usually, when I feel something, I will take a step back to recalibrate and categorize feeling into thought. This process, governed by guiding principles, helps me evaluate my needs relative to my desires, which, all in all, leads to consumption with greater clarity. I’m a lower case conscious consumer, rather than an upper case one (identified by the cultural lore). These checks and balances govern my approach, philosophically, and will shape how we discuss shopping on trademarked moving forward. 

Principles guiding discovery, curation, and desire vs restraint 

Here are a few of my guiding principles, many of which I’ve made content around in the past via my instagram & tiktok: 

1. Fixations - so adhd core of me, but this category defines the things I cannot stop thinking about because they’re just so good and bring so much joy. Everything here has given me that all-consuming buzz of discovering something that I believe is truly incredible. These are things that 1) I own and love enough to make part of my personality; 2) things I am feral for and WILL be buying; and 3) things that are deeply unrealistic, yet I feel this gut-punch yearning for  (e.g. I’m priced out of, don’t have space for, and/or makes zero sense for my lifestyle, etc.). I believe everyone has their own version of fixations — the things that exist in true alignment with your identity. And, I don’t really believe that anyone’s fixations need to have mass appeal to make them meaningful. As with everything, some people get it, others don’t, and largely, it doesn’t really matter, either way. A few of my fixations (new and ongoing) include this couch (but in silver), these sneakers, this sweater, this painting, and this sparkling water.

Gervasoni Nuvola 12 Sofa (custom silver upholstery), by Paola Navone — seen at Bottega (Melrose)

Dries Suede Sneakers

The Row Helfi Sweater

Jeanine Brito’s Red Lamb, 2024

Sant Aniol Sparkling Water

2. The Yum Scale - oftentimes, when I like something, my knee-jerk statement is omg that’s delicious. There’s a delight in this kind of discovery. However, from a MECE/framework POV - these are the things that don’t fit squarely into my fixation category. I don’t always feel compelled to buy, but I know it’s good, intuitively. They are delightful bits that won’t fundamentally alter my life by owning or not owning (although sometimes, over time, they do become fixations). It’s like consumption purgatory - you drop off the list, you bubble up, or you stay there.. Forever. Recent yums include Chanel’s pony hair ballet flat (can’t find online but currently @ bergdorf’s), and Bottega’s niche-viral suede tote. TBD on their fate in the realm of my desires. 

Chanel pony hair ballerinas

Bottega Cabat Tote

3. The Cool/Chic Axis - this is my most concretely defined, identity-driven framework. I am largely governed by this idea that some things mutually, yet, exclusively coexist on an axis between ephemeral (cool) and timeless (chic). Some things are distinctly one or the other, whilst others blend together as both. I need to dedicate an entire letter to this concept, because I think it deserves one, and then we’ll get into what it means more practically, in terms of how I sort information and things. For the quickest example, using print media, I think Paper Mag is obviously cool, whereas Tatler is obviously timeless. T Magazine is squarely both. 

Ok.. whew.. that concludes today’s introductory shopping letter!! And hopefully, it sets us up for deeper dives and conversations around what we’re shopping/consuming, married against our fixations and desires… always leveraging these principles as the baseline to organize and sort endless streams of information and things. Thank you for giving me the space to share more about me, in a personal sense, and I’m looking forward to diving into all - conceptual, philosophical, and literal, in letters to come <3 we’ll pick this up with more tangible shopping..and things.. on friday!!

TM x