Impulse Buy

If you have the same model of phone I do, yours has three buttons—non-virtual ones that respond to pressure, with actual crevices that can get actually grimy with finger oils and pocket gunk. Each performs a primary, prosaic function: button #1, volume up; button #2, volume down; button #3, display off. When an object of desire crosses your screen, though, the buttons reconfigure into something else: opportunities for capture. Squeeze buttons #1 and #3 at once and you can snag a picture of the desired thing—more precisely, an image of its image. Press button #3 two times fast and you leave the virtual realm, sending off real money so that someone will in turn send you the thing you think you want. The erotics of cashless-payment design is a cursed subject, but it’s worth noting that whereas literal and figurative “frictionlessness” is so thoroughly fetishized across our experience of the internet, tech companies still recognize that a little tactile resistance remains powerful when it comes to telling our brains, via our fingertips, that we have acted on an urge.

Faced with the yak fleece, I opted at first for the “image of its image” route, taking a screenshot and posting it to stories—“owning” it, I hoped, by “sharing” it. No luck. I write a newsletter about rare and beautiful objects and, in another attempt to expel my yearning, I rhapsodized about the yak fleece there. But of course it stayed on my mind, the way ridiculous and beautiful things have a way of doing. Rather than dissipating, my desire to own this fleece slowly gained in tension, like a slingshot pulled backed further and further until, suddenly, it fired. At the end of October, I received a paycheck I hadn’t been expecting, and upon opening the envelope I found myself reaching for my phone, swiping my way yakwards, and double-smashing button #3. I sent $990 from California to Okayama in a series of maneuvers so rapid and unbroken that the paycheck never left my other hand.

What do impulse buys circa 2021 look and feel like? The question applies across all kinds of shopping—what becomes of supermarket-checkout-type impulse buys when you order all your groceries in a browser? But it’s particularly interesting in the context of clothes, where spontaneous purchases can yield impractical and tragicomically expensive results that “sudden groceries” can’t match—and where, in the last few years, an elaborate machinery of limited-edition drops has proliferated, designed to make more of our purchases spontaneous than ever before. These drops aren’t simply about manufactured scarcity, but about creating frenzied conditions optimal for lizard-brain impulse buys: You have one vanishingly small window in which to buy this vanishingly rare thing—can you jump through it?

Impulse buys require either money or credit—meaning that, growing up, they were definitionally impossible for me, with neither. My parents, who made not-very-much money working as what would today be called “freelance creatives,” nixed my adolescent-era pleas for Air Jordans and Starter Jackets so absolutely and unbudgingly that before long I gave up asking.

They did give me a small allowance, and I remember spending several weeks in 1993 saving up for a Stüssy tee I spotted on sale at a skate shop for $12. That highly premeditated purchase stands in contrast to the earliest impulse clothing-buy in my adult memory: In my early twenties, I made my first full-time salary and could finally buy the sorts of things I’d been “denied” as a kid—an ersatz-retributive psychology that seems common among people who grew up imbibing the prerogatives of a consumer culture but lacking the capital to participate in it. After work one day, I went to a party at a now-defunct downtown Manhattan store called Nom de Guerre, where they were serving free alcohol: an impulse buy accelerant as classic as it gets. I left with a hooded A.P.C. jacket in tan ripstop, with one of the early Rue de Fleurus tags, paying just north of $100 for it, final sale—and woke up at 2 a.m. panicked about my drunken extravagance. The next morning, I regarded the jacket warily, then mustered my best mental list of reasons I’d actually been wise to buy it.

A state of abandon creates a little momentary vacuum of reason that we try to fill with post-hoc justifications. We act as though there is no future, and then the weight of the future rushes in. As it happens, I still own that A.P.C. jacket (the Stüssy shirt, too!) which proves that even an impulse buy spurred on by alcohol and chased with night terror can, in the long term, off-gas none of the regret we associate with spontaneous behavior, and can actually outlive any number of “more judicious” purchases we’ve made.

That drunken splurge also speaks to the power of something that’s much harder to come by these days: real-life social pressure. I was at a party, surrounded by people who seemed cool and encouraged by a friend who said the jacket looked awesome, all of which combined into its own powerful intoxicant, separate from the open bar. Subsequent impulse-buys happened stone-sober under the gaze of sales clerks who also seemed cool, and whose looks of boredom and/or barely masked disdain could be seductive, too, compounding my sense that I was, in some alluringly unhealthy way, spending money not merely irresponsibly but illicitly—betraying fundamental values my bohemian parents had worked hard to instill.

No clerks, of course, hover when you’re scrolling through social-media feeds or web shops. No buddies goad you at your elbow. A whole category of impulse-buy-induction has been rendered almost impossible today. You could argue that social-media creates its own high-intensity gaze—an enormous digital panopticon under which you buy a garment for the imagined approval of absented “friends” and/or strangers. This is true, though I’ve also found that this gaze travels both ways. Now you can readily see how unappealing other people look posing in pieces you might have otherwise coveted, in a way that helpfully curdles your desire to own them.

It’s this broader atmosphere of digital-age plenty that gave rise to the phenomenon of limited-edition drops. In the context of these blink-and-you-miss-them product releases, the intrinsic appeal of any given garment becomes necessarily less important in the overall math: It still matters if a shirt is cool, but the fact that it will sell out in under six minutes creates a reality-distortion field around what, exactly, “cool” means. It’s not dissimilar to the way that, if someone tells you they have a secret, you instantly become desperate to know it, as though your life will be impoverished if you don’t. The actual content of the secret itself becomes secondary to its tantalizing form.

But you can only play those games so many times before they lose their Pavlovian luster. The same goes for a whole internet-era category of wearable memes, like Big Dogs t-shirts (an old brand given new life on Instagram), Chunky Dunkys, or KFC Crocs. When confronted with curiosities along these lines, the “image of the image” route should be more than enough to scratch the itch—text a screenshot to some friends and enjoy a cleaner dopamine hit than buying the thing could ever provide.

Maybe that helps explain why the yak fleece tripped my defenses. Its scarcity wasn’t artificial, but a result of unique materials that demand to be touched (yak wool?) and seen (persimmon dye?) in person, meaning a screenshot was never going to cut it. While writing this essay, I was interrupted by a text from a friend whose taste I admire, telling me he’d been thinking about ordering a yak fleece for himself since he saw it in my newsletter, ideating to the point that now he wanted to know my size. This filled me with a momentary, guilty kind of pride: I worried that I’d passed a bit of mania on to him from my corner of the panopticon, even as his desire flattered my judgment.

So far, time and use have flattered it, too: Since the jacket arrived from Japan, I’ve worn it every day—perhaps to help justify its price tag, perhaps because it is a precision engineered swaddling device at a time when physical comfort is as appealing as ever. I put it on first thing in the morning, before I step into my backyard to feed a stray cat I’m trying to befriend; I wear it on hikes and on errands; it remains on till it’s time to make dinner. On the best available evidence, it was an impulse buy as prudent as they come. At least, that’s what I’ll tell myself at 2 a.m.

Jonah Weiner writes a newsletter called Blackbird Spyplane.