I don’t subscribe to Vogue or Women’s Wear Daily. I buy clothing from mall chain stores. The most expensive articles of clothing I own are a Lacoste jacket and a pair of 7 for All Mankind jeans. But, at the mere mention of Marc Jacobs, my mind transitions to whenever is mentioned at hand. But why?
I was born and raised in Ohio. The Not-Quite-Midwest and Not-Quite-East Coast center of America. Not many people realize that without Ohio, most American shopping malls wouldn’t exist.
Did you know that Abercrombie and Fitch, Hollister, Ruehl No. 925, Victoria’s Secret, The Limited, Bath and Body Works, Express, White Barn Candle Company, New York and Company, Lane Bryant and several others are based out of Ohio? But yet, if you ask most people in Ohio, they couldn’t tell you who Marc Jacobs, Karl Lagerfield or Tom Ford are. But for some non-sensical reason, I can.
I interned in New York City last year. I already had a penchant for designers, but it wasn’t truly awakened until after I worked in the same building where Vogue was published.
I remember once walking through Bloomingdale’s with a friend at 52nd and Lexington in Manhattan during a visit this past spring, and I casually said “That looks like a Marc Jacobs top.” And after checking the tag, it was. She just snickered and said I had a “gift,” and we carried on.
I’ve been called a label whore before, yet rarely anything I wear is a label. I think that it probably comes from the rather vast collection of designer handbags that are hanging on the back of my closet doors. People see me carrying them and assume something about me. Sure, I have a couple of fake bags — but the rest are real. I think it’s an insult to the designer to carry anything else.
To me, my designer bags are individual pieces of artwork. In 7th grade, I went to Miami for the first time and went to an outdoor shopping mall called Bal Harbour, a new concept way back in 1998. Every designer you could think of had a store at this mall.
My brother, who was a freshman in high school at the time, thought he deserved a Gucci “timepiece.” So my brother dragged me along into the Gucci store. While he inquired about watches, I saw a beautiful golden handbag hanging proudly in the window. It was love at first sight, and nothing has been the same since.
Last month, it was like déjà vu. I went back to Miami for the first time in almost a decade and as I walked through Bal Harbour again, that memory came back. The Gucci store had moved locations, but it was like nothing had changed in almost 10 years.
This time when I was there, I was at a place where I could actually buy something. So, I proudly walked into the Marc Jacobs store and treated myself to a purple handbag and a red quilted wristlet.
As I passed Tory Burch, Louis Vuitton, Prada, and Jimmy Choo, a sense of grownup-ness overcame me. I realized that I wasn’t that 7th grader who was pining over something because it had a label on it. I was appreciating a work of art, which so many individuals seem to overlook.
To me, Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Tory Burch, Manolo Blahnik, Carolina Herrera, Chanel and others are to me like what Claude Monet, Andy Warhol, Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso are to those whom study art. The label that is stitched into the tag of the item is so much more than just a label. It is the signature of the artist on their canvas, but in a different form.
So, when someone calls me a label whore, I take it as a compliment. I see what so many others fail to see — a truly underappreciated art form in what so many of us live our life from within everyday.
~Sara McKinnis
Springfield, Ohio
s09.smckinniss@wittenberg.edu
