I shop, therefore I am (exhausted)

Everyone is selling, no one is buying.

Why do people buy what they buy?

It’s a question I can’t stop circling, and one I imagine is haunting the creative directors pacing backstage this season, praying their new vision can do something no one seems able to pull off anymore: make people actually purchase things again.

A few years ago, I wasn’t thinking about any of this. I was too busy being entertained: Bella Hadid spray-painted into a dress mid-runway, the Kardashians waddling around like Balenciaga-branded caution tape mummies. The clothes themselves barely mattered; the image was the product. Maybe that was the omen of decay, but at the time it just felt like fun, a carnival so absorbing you could forget there was supposed to be a transaction beneath it all.

Now the carnival has curdled. Earnings are in free fall, the stakes climbing ever higher. In chasing memes and viral stunts, the industry drifted from its fundamental purpose: selling clothes. Which is why 2025 has felt like a season-long obituary tour for luxury, headline after headline lamenting decimated profits. This year’s wager carries a weight that feels almost biblical in its desperation: that one messiah figure, armed with a new aesthetic, a new story, a new something can ignite a feverish need to consume - not just hot takes on TikTok, but actual products - back into our brains.

Demna’s La Famiglia landed in stores just a day after its premiere. Is his new hyped up vision enough to get people to see now, buy now baby.

But what do people even want now? Do they crave the sanctity of craft, the gospel of hand-stitched devotion (Bottega’s line)? Or cultural provocation as method, world building as brand (Demna’s signature)? Appetite shifts not week to week but scroll to scroll, leaving the industry grasping at mirages: one moment worshipping artisanal mystique, the next trying to bottle TikTok virality. What it clings to isn’t demand so much as phantoms - spectres that also haunt a socioeconomic landscape in disarray, where the middle class is shrinking, disposable income evaporates into rent and debt and the very fantasy of aspiration is dissolving.

Luxury fashion has always been uncanny. By definition, it isn’t about need (otherwise we’d be talking about soap or socks, not four-figure handbags). It thrives on desire detached from utility. For decades, the trick worked: sleight-of-hand seduction that could turn a logo into a #lifegoal. What feels telling now is how that sleight of hand has metastasised, grown too obvious and over-performed. The industry keeps reaching for the same rabbit in the same hat, no wonder the audience has stopped gasping and is instead rolling their eyes.

But like bacteria exposed to antibiotics for too long, once you try to kill the magic it mutates, evolving into strains that refuse to die and infecting other corners of the marketplace. Branding has gone feral. Diesel conjures seventy-year-old AI models, preening at their shredded abs in the mirror. Kate Spade sells purses swollen into ketchup packets. Even products once sold on function alone - razors, mattresses, water - are pulled into the vortex of meme and discourse. The old illusion of scarcity and prestige has soured into a grotesquerie: a desperate, overclocked attention economy where everything, from couture to condiments, plays the same game.

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Take denim. I’ve never thought so much about jeans in my life as I did this summer, or more accurately, about ads for jeans. Two opposing camps emerged. Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign, a pin-up authoritarian remix of Brooke Shields’ Calvin Klein era: fascist Americana lacquered as sex appeal. And Gap, staging inclusivity as choreography. One strategy baited outrage, the other promised utopia. Both went viral, both spawned memes, both dominated discourse for a week. But did either make people actually want jeans?

“I guess you could say that the visibility that comes with engagement inevitably leads more people to seeing the product, and inevitably some of those people will buy it,” wrote iD editor in chief Thom Bettridge on his Substack Content. “But you can’t build a brand off negative attention - not because it’s negative, because it’s just attention. Neither Rage nor Cringe produce purchase-intent or community. They’re a collective scream into the void.”

And yet so much of marketing now feels like that scream. Campaigns flare and die in the space of a meme cycle. The products gather dust on racks. The void, it turns out, does not shop.

I shop, therefore I am

Asking why people shop is a question rarely given the rigour it deserves, despite the fact that consumption underwrites almost everything about the world we live in. Too often it’s dismissed as frivolous, the fodder for pop-psych quizzes and chick-flick montages - women squealing under department-store fluorescents, high on the rush of stilettos and pop songs. But strip away the clichés and the enterprise reveals itself for what it actually is: the bloodstream of the society we’ve built.

Part of its power is precisely that it feels so ordinary. Shopping is so habitual it barely registers as an activity and yet, as author Alain de Botton points out, it may be the defining marker of modernity itself. For most of human history there was simply nothing to buy. “Ninety-eight percent of the income of a Northern European peasant in the twelfth century went on food: porridge, bread, cabbage, peas and, in a good week, mutton,” he writes in How to Survive the Modern World.

Then agriculture improved. Crop rotations, better yields and suddenly: surplus. Families had the wild novelty of spare cash. Not much, just enough for a belt, a brass button, a copper pan if you were feeling flush, but enough to tip the dominoes. Over centuries, those dominoes cascaded through global trade routes, colonial extraction and the rise of industrial cities - enriched by exploitation and supercharged on the backs of unpaid workers - as demand sparked manufacturing, manufacturing created jobs and jobs created more demand. The feedback loop of capitalism lit up like a pinball machine.

By the nineteenth century, Sears catalogs were landing in American homes, presenting a carnival of goods that peasants a century earlier couldn’t have dreamt of. The ads inside were almost charming in their bluntness. This coat will keep you warm. This soap will clean your teeth. This wagon will get you from A to B. Compared to today’s fever-dream branding, those early ads feel almost naïve. It told you what the product was, and asked, politely, that you consider buying it.

However by the early twentieth, the great machine of industrial capitalism had hit its own ceiling. You had a coat, you had a bed, you had a car, which posed an awkward question for the men selling coats, beds, and cars. If everyone already has what they need, why on earth would they keep buying?

If human needs were stable and finite, markets would eventually collapse under their own efficiency, which is why Lehman Brothers executive Paul Mazur, in a 1927 piece he wrote for the Harvard Business Review told his fellow marketers and ad men: “We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

Lucky for him, a few years on American psychologist Abraham Maslow would unveil his now-infamous hierarchy of needs. What begins as a theory of human motivation is almost immediately repurposed as a marketing manual. The base layers (food, shelter, a way to get around) are finite, capped by the fact that you can’t eat three dinners at once or own more than one roof over your head at a time. But everything above that baseline (intimacy, status, recognition, transcendence) is infinite. You can never have enough love, or enough proof that you’re loved. You can never be fully satisfied with how you belong, how you’re seen, how you become yourself. And once brands realise they can wire those insatiable hungers to whatever they’re selling the whole marketplace starts running on a kind of perpetual motion machine of desire.

“It now seems that the way to get customers shopping was not to emphasise the capacity of a product to fulfil a basic need, as advertisers had always naively assumed,” writes de Botton. “Instead the move was to imply an offer of a solution to a vital spiritual hunger while in fact - at the last moment - swerving to direct the customer to a shirt or a car.”

No one grasped this better than Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the self-declared “father of spin.” Bernays understood that if the unconscious was, as Freud said, a swamp of repressed desires, then marketing could be a business of drainage. His first great experiment: cigarettes. When George Washington Hill of the American Tobacco Company realised half women - half the population - weren’t smoking, dismissing it as “unladylike”, he smelled profit. Bernays consulted Freud’s student A.A. Brill, who framed cigarettes as “torches of freedom,” symbols of equality with men. On Easter Sunday, 1929, Bernays staged the spectacle: debutantes in couture parading down Fifth Avenue, reaching into their purses and pulling out not cigarettes, but torches of freedom. Suddenly a carcinogenic stick of dried leaves was a feminist exclamation point. Autonomy in action, in a puff of smoke. Sales exploded.

It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly consumer culture tied to self worth became the atmosphere of the late twentieth century. You can see it in Patrick Bateman, the walking void of American Psycho, whose ego rested entirely on his encyclopaedic knowledge of yuppie brands and the micro-distinctions between Armani ties, Oliver Peoples glasses or the bone-coloured thickness of a colleague’s business card.

Barbara Kruger caught this shift midstream in her I Shop Therefore I Am (1987) photomontage, a diagnosis of a world in which Descartes’ old claim - that to think was proof of being - had been displaced by the far more banal and far more powerful proof of purchase. Made at the frothing height of the 1980s boom, the work crystallised a truth that to exist was not to interrogate your desires but to demonstrate them at the cash register, to let the fact of acquisition stand in for the fact of selfhood.

Maslow’s ponzi scheme

So why doesn’t it work anymore? Why doesn’t desire - once the bottomless fuel tank of consumerism, the thing that could be endlessly stoked and repackaged into handbags and perfume ads - translate into consumption the way it used to? Sure, the obvious answer is money, or lack thereof. Yes, there’s a cost-of-living crisis, yes, tariffs, yes, inflation. But there’s more going on than just a lack of $$$.

As Francis Zierer wrote in Dirt, “The new ‘learn to code’ is ‘learn to do marketing.’” Where marketing used to be a discrete industry, it is now something we are acutely aware of in daily life - a common vernacular that everyone speaks, whether they mean to or not. Teenagers cutting TikToks, Substackers repurposing essays into content (guilty), your coworker hustling for engagement on LinkedIn - each one is running a micro-campaign on themselves. Which means brands aren’t speaking to naïve consumers but pitching to rival marketers.

When everyone is a marketer, everyone is also a sceptic. The recent flood of “propaganda I’m not falling for” is telling of the communal awareness we have that every gesture online is mediated by something trying to scrape value from us, from algorithms harvesting our eyeballs to the brand “trend-jacking” a meme for awareness. To be unmasked as an “NPC” who is easily manipulated is the most vibrational thing to happen to you, whereas as brand strategist Eugene Healey points out: “The influencer or creator is an avatar of human agency and a sort of perverse attempt to assert control because now you get to be the one doing the programming. You are an active creator of culture rather than passive consumer.”

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Which is why Maslow’s pyramid has further morphed into a Ponzi scheme. We sell each other the promise of the next rung - buy this, join that, follow me - and yet every step is less about moving upward than about pulling someone else in to fund our own climb. The cycle has swelled so quickly, inflated by hype and endless proofs of progress, that the whole thing has popped like a balloon filled with too much hot air.

What was supposed to be fulfilment has soured into performance: proof of taste through our curated reading lists (also guilty), proof of belonging through our run club selfies, proof that we’ve self actualised through our our vlogs of morning routines and productivity hacks. We climb and climb, and instead of transcendence or solidarity we find reflections of ourselves refracted back through commerce, like an empty funhouse at the top. No one brands have also been booted off.

If the pyramid feels broken, maybe the fix isn’t to torch it but to actually use it the way it was meant to be used. Not as a hierarchy of psychological levers to pull until we hand over a credit card, but as a kind of civic architecture: a map of what it means to live in a way that feels less belittling. Consumers aren’t hollowed-out husks, incapable of wanting. They’re just exhausted from counterfeit desire.

The future won’t belong to the brands screaming loudest into the algorithmic void. It will belong to the ones who figure out how to stop screaming entirely. To stop performing desire and actually service it. To stop building vibes and start building ladders.

What does that look like? Esteem won’t mean not securing another “limited drop” but a guarantee: clothes that last, technology that isn’t designed to break in 18 months, health products that actually… work. Belonging might look like brands investing in communal infrastructure instead of pretending their Discord server is a community. Self-actualisation could mean companies enabling people to build skills or learn something new, not selling transcendence through a handbag, but giving tools that actually expand what a person can do.

The catch, of course, is that this isn’t sexy. You can’t meme it into virality as easily as a spray-on dress or a Kardashian wrapped in caution tape. But if everyone is already fluent in the old tricks, the real counterculture move isn’t to invent a new one but to stop tricking altogether.

Maslow wasn’t wrong. The needs are still there. It’s just that brands mistook the pyramid for a slot machine, when really it’s more like a scaffolding. And scaffolding, unlike vibes, actually holds weight.