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| PROJECT | American Thrift: Travelling Through the First World's Second Economy | ||
| PARTICIPANT | Camille Norton | ||
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| LOCATION | American Towns and Cities | ||
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| REQUEST |  |
THE IDEA OF THRIFT IS LIKE A NUT IN A SHELL The idea of thrift is an American cliché. It is impossible, for example, to think of European thriftiness, as in Italian or French thrift. There is Scottish "stinginess," but that is not the same thing as thrift. The purveyor of American thrift is Benjamin Franklin, who elevated it to a New World virtue and ideal. The notion of thrift has to do with saving rather than spending. A thrifty person saves money rather than spends it, or spends less on an object than another person might. Thrift might also be associated with conservation of resources through the patching up and recycling of goods, the extended life of objects. But this notion of thrift, first as ideal, then as cultural practice, became a cliché sometime around 1960, when it was replaced by the ideal of consumption. By the mid 1990's, consumption had become conspicuous consumption. In other words, people invented status for themselves according to their ability to purchase things at a speed and rate that were unprecedented. As a result, many relatively new things could be discarded rapidly, which resulted not only in a boon for thrift stores but in the creation of a whole new kind of store, the second-hand or almost-new store, in which last season's fashions are sold off by twenty-somethings in order to raise cash for new purchases. HOW I BECAME THRIFTY My interest in American "Thrift Stores" developed eight years ago when I took a job as an Assistant Professor at a private university in California's Central Valley. It was the mid-1990's, at a moment when American prosperity was about to explode on the global stage. As a new professor, I was expected to dress well on a salary that I guessed might be equivalent to a San Francisco bus driver's. And I was learning fast that professional life, like the late-stage capitalism, is based on "the performative," on one's ability to appear "suited" or "fitted" for one's profession. In my case, and I suspect in the case of most Americans, appearing suitable meant appearing a good deal more prosperous than I really was. Fortunately, I was taken in hand by two senior professors, both women, who taught me how to shop in thrift stores and consignment shops, as they had done for years. And so I was saved. By the late 1990's, at the height of the dot.com boom in California, I was spending more and more time in thrift stores in California's Central Valley. I went to thrift stores to unwind my mind and to exercise my visual fancy for the unforeseen object. But I was soon fascinated by thrift stores as an indicator of a vibrant second economy, a sub-economy of the richest nation in the world. In Stockton, at Superior Thrift, I observed that populations of immigrants treated the thrift store as a department store--as a place where one bought clothes for children starting school, or furniture for a new home. Superior Thirst is a big Thrift Store, with distinct departments and a P.A. system that broadcasts, in Spanish and in English, updates about sale items or about trouble in the parking lot. The atmosphere there is both festive and dignified. No one behaves as if the store is second-rate or inferior to the real thing in the mall. Over time, I've come to admire the composure of thrift stores, the way they possess a culture, an ethos, and a circuit of desire and pleasure. The thrift store is a place where migrant workers and college professors can afford to search for frivolous objects as well as necessary ones. It is a place where middle class women shop at lunch time, a place where strangers talk to one another in the aisles about the quality of fabric or the cut of a dress, a place where the borders between formality and informality shift in surprising ways. DRIFTING INTO SPACES OF THRIFT/THOUGHTS FOR A TRAVELER Is there such a thing as a "poetics" of the thrift store? Thrift stores are in fact places of transformation in which the used becomes the new and the cast off becomes the found. What makes an object beautiful or desired? Why do people shop in thrift stores? For utility? Out of desperation? Out of a sense of adventure? With a spirit of irony or cheap thrills? And is there such a thing as the poliics of thrift stores? Does the second economy, the thrift economy, mimic the first economy of late-stage-capitalism? Or does it contradict the pressures of the market by selling low what people value once highly? And so you are a traveler now, entering into these spaces of thrift, encountering strangers in aisles who are in search of something too. How can you travel through the country by way of the margin of thrift stores, the second economy behind the tourist economy of official America? Wherever you stop, you document the place, its quality of light, it regionalness. Each stop becomes a narrative about a search, a narrative that involve both poetics and politics. At each thrift store,find one person and ask them to talk about what they are looking for and why. Ask them why they are looking for it here, in a thrift store, instead of elsewhere. And try to see whether they can tell you a story about themselves in the process of getting them to talk about what they're looking for. Then collect these stories on this web site. It might look like this: Maybeline Johnson was looking for a red dress. Maybeline Johnson was looking for a red dress to catch a man in. It was late September in Jackson, Mississippi. Here's a picture of Maybeline. And here's what Maybeline has to say about men: "When you lie down with dogs you rise up fleas." Now heres a picture of Maybeline walking to her car. She's carrying that red dress. She's in love with a man named Robert Johnson. Who may be a dog. Or not. Possible questions: Why did you come here today? What are you hoping to find? |
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