How My Grandmother Took Me from Dollar Store to Dior

In 1996, my mother bought me a pair of baby-blue shell toe Adidas. The price tag: sixty dollars. For the rest of high school, they were my go-tos. Even after they were scuffed and battered and pushed to the back of the closet, I schlepped them with me during moves up and down California’s coast.

I’m not a particularly nostalgic person, but the shell-toes were a significant marker—one I felt guilty parting with. At sixty dollars, they were the most expensive shoes my mother had ever bought me. I remember the moment she handed me that bag at Journey’s in the mall, inducing equal parts joy and anxiety that would come to signify my relationship to clothes and class for the next two decades.

Like lots of poor kids, especially those raised by single parents, I wasn’t shielded from the numerical gymnastics my mother performed to get by. The sound of her moving money around on paper was the white noise of my youth. Scraping by on a matrix of child support checks, part-time work, and, when necessary, welfare, I could intuit when an extra meal out or trip to the laundromat taxed my mother—and thereby us—financially.

I walked a thin line between my desire to consume and my corralling of that desire, always weighing their costs. Mostly, we thrifted. New clothes were purchased on layaway at the Marts—K and Wal. Occasionally, we paid cash in full at the Family Bargain Center in Redding, where leggings sold two-for-ten in wire bins and matching sets in loud, cheap polyester prints lined the $7.99 racks. Even the price tags were geared toward the poor.

As Bourree Lam writes in The Atlantic, tags ending in ‘.99’ present the illusion of a deal, while round numbers are more soothing and affirmative to those with fatter pockets. Consumers looking for luxury or recreational products, such as a bottle of champagne, are more likely to spring for the $40 bottle than one priced at $39.72 or $40.28.

Clean numbers are for the middle class.

Eleven months a year, my home was in northern California with my mother and half-brother. But for two weeks each summer, I lived an alternate monied existence in Miami with my fathers’ parents. My grandfather was a retired surgeon and married to a Northwestern alumna, my grandmother—Gramsie for short. It was with her that I learned the difference between price and cost.

Every summer, Gramsie’s first order of business was wardrobe enhancement. When I was a young girl, that meant receiving a curated selection of new clothes—Gramsie’s capsule collection. The most thrilling moment of my visit was running to the guest room and flinging open the closet doors to reveal the new short sets, dresses, swimsuits, and sandals that my grandmother had picked out and purchased just for me.

For years, I relished her upgrades. I’d ditch the clothes Mom packed from home to twirl in new ruffled skirts or swim in sparkly suits until they were faded with chlorine and tropical sun. I didn’t know then that my new summer wardrobe wasn’t exactly free. It was an exchange and, as these things usually do, it came with expectations. My grandmother was styling me to belong in a world that would never be mine.

*

My Miami life was non-transferrable. Planes between Florida and Cali became my Clark Kent phone booths as I swapped out ‘ensembles’ for clothes; went from ‘pieces’ to pants. I carried home tangible souvenirs, like that killer summer of ’93 purple suede skirt from The Limited. But back in poor rural California, I paid a different price for these luxuries. There was a polish to my Miami attire that alienated folks I’d grown up with. While she wanted the best for me, even my mother resented the freedom that wealth afforded my father’s family.

One Christmas, Gramsie sent Mom a designer red leather purse instead of what she needed most: money. It was a well-intentioned, if oblivious, gift. I think Gramise hoped the purse would be a holiday treat. Something to relieve Mom from the mundanity of bill-paying. A little something luxurious just for you.

Instead, Mom hurled the purse across the room into our gaudy, lopsided Christmas tree. What people with money don’t realize is that bill-paying, especially on time, is not only not boring—it’s the only way for people trying to make ends meet to feel a modicum of freedom from the unrelenting anxiety of ‘will we make it this month?’

The gap between me and Gramsie widened during my teen years. At thirteen, I’d gotten an illegal job cleaning motel rooms at a California golf resort so I could buy my own clothes. By sixteen, I was penciling in my identity with brown Wet and Wild lip liner (#666) and frosty white eyeshadow. I wore lavender vinyl hot pants that zipped up the front and tight white shirts cut open to reveal a slash of belly.

I was more ’90s suburban wannabe-hoochie than the prep-school sweetheart Gramsie hoped I’d grow into. She wanted Hepburn or Jackie O; I served her Stefani meets Badu. I gravitated toward wild patterns and bold graphic black-and-white, which, according to her tight-lipped frowns, were not the proper aesthetic for a young girl in her family.

She never did articulate why, but I got the sense that somehow I should just know. That people ‘like us’ had a certain image to uphold. I should be clear: Hers was not a personal vendetta against me. My grandmother wanted the same milquetoast aesthetic for everyone who bore her name. I just happened to be the farthest flung and needed the most work to pass.

Over time, her annual capsule collections were replaced with shopping trips, followed by a visit to the salon to “clean up” my hair and nails, no matter what state they were in. At the mall, we bypassed the stores I yearned for in California: Contempo Casuals, Urban Outfitters, Wet Seal. Unlike my mother, she didn’t refuse me short skirts or tight tops, but she refused to buy things that she judged as cheap.

She shopped only for complete ensembles, whereas I bought items one at a time as I could afford them. The level of cohesion and bounty required to think in outfits was wildly beyond me. We sailed through Burdines and Bloomingdale’s. I let her buy me white pants and pastel tops and cute straw bags with matching sandals. I never wore them at home, but I did at lobster dinners in Miami to meet her friends.

Mostly it was to placate her. I also knew that if I pretended that I might one day grow into a chinos-and-loafers sorta gal, Gramsie would occasionally let me slip a brown leather OTK boot into my cart. I’d begun to understand what was being asked of me. We were both playing dress up.

Sometimes, in the deep end of a shopping trip, I’d spin in the dressing-room mirror and imagine buttoning myself into this life like a crisp white shirt. Things seemed simpler there. Free of angst and edge. Who would I be in those clothes? Would I be more like my cousin, T?

I’d spin in the dressing-room mirror and imagine buttoning myself into this life like a crisp white shirt. Things seemed simpler there.

T was the closest thing I’d had to a sister growing up. Two years younger than me and raised by her father in Miami, she stayed close to our grandparents. She often stopped by their house for lunch in high school—she went to the prep school down the street—and spent weekends with them. T was both my best cousinfriend, and the model of everything I was not and would never be.

One summer, on vacation with her family in the Bahamas, I pulled out a tie-dye shirt. “Cute,” she said.

“$7.50,” I chirped.

My beautiful fifteen-year-old, blonde-haired, green-eyed cousin looked incredulous. “Where do you find this stuff?”

“Ross,” I said.

She stared at me blankly. She didn’t know what Ross was.

A native of white wealth, my cousin fell squarely into Gramsie’s preferred aesthetic. She was bred into a visual lexicon of class cues, brand choices, and styling touches. Not only had she not shopped the bargain bins, she didn’t realize that the way she read my style was inherited.

She was operating from what author Elizabeth Currid-Halkett calls the social power of the wealthy. “Social class is not produced through consumption,” writes Halkett in The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class. “It is attained through the adoption of values and aesthetics and the ability to decipher symbols and signs beyond materialism.”

Instead of dollar amounts, they speak in codes. Through designer logos, to start. But at its highest levels, the visual language of wealth is elusive and ephemeral. It is always shifting. Harper’s Bazaar Australia nails the opaque designator of Rich Girl Style, calling it “a clear, confident cohesion in the way they pull together their looks.”

I did not exhibit clear, confident cohesion. While I dressed for the offense, trying to actively craft and claim something for myself in monied spaces, T was trained to dress in the affirmative—in brands and with subtle touches that certified her position. Nails painted ‘blush’ and other neutral colors, says Halkett, are an example of subdued displays of wealth that distinguish the elite from the wannabes. T often wore blush nails.

I was working with what I had—little money, but a surplus of creativity and attitude. My style was rooted firstly in resourcefulness, not aspiration or bounty. I’d learned to love a good deal out of necessity, but eventually my ability to make something from not much at all became a point of pride. I didn’t know that, for the rich, speaking openly about this was gauche—a faux pas that, as it had with my cousin, exposed me as a class traitor. Gramsie tried to tell me this one day as we ate lunch at a sidewalk café in Miami’s Coconut Grove.

“Oooh, love that skirt,” cooed a leathery blonde.

“Thanks!” I exclaimed. “Five ninety-nine! Got it on sale.”

“Honey,” Gramsie hushed me. “You don't have to tell people all your secrets.”

Gramsie wasn’t being a snob. Or, she wasn’t just being a snob. She was trying to school me.

*

In my late twenties, I began to resist Gramsie’s shopping trips altogether. Instead, I demanded quality time, oversharing details of my ragtag upbringing while she flinched over poolside Chardonnay. She began to listen to my tales of adventure—driving around the entire country for one month in a Honda hatchback with eight hundred dollars, hiking through the Andes alone—and saw something other than how I looked.

My closet then was like my life: full of wacky pieces with no solids or basics to bring them together. Working overtime to make something from nothing, I purchased things for their potential instead of their polish. Getting dressed was a rambling exercise in pulling together the disparate parts of me. It was exhausting.

Determined to remain loyal to my class of poor California bohemian, maybe I dressed the part for longer than necessary. By maintaining disorder and bold color in my closet, I’d not only rejected what I considered the bland chic of my grandmother’s style, but tried to keep something of the discount pride I’d come from.

Originally, shouting out prices when no one cared was my attempt to pass along practical information. A sort of open-source shopping network. Later, though, as I built a life and bank account of my own, the shout-outs became an attempt to stay centered in the place I’d come from. I couldn’t break my compulsion to share the specifics of the price tag. It felt like I’d be losing something more than just my poor manners.

I didn’t want people to think that I was beyond a great five-dollar shirt. I wasn’t beyond a great five-dollar shirt, right?

I didn’t want people to think that I was beyond a great five-dollar shirt. I wasn’t beyond a great five-dollar shirt, right?

Eventually, I was able to buy my own sixty-dollar shoes, then one-hundred-dollar heels, and for my thirtieth birthday, a pair of $250 blue leather Frye boots I’d been eyeing for a year. Slowly, I began to “invest in quality pieces,” as Gramsie had urged. Still, I stanned an unfinished hem and, when getting dressed, resisted a full look, telling myself that the perfection of an engineered outfit, one of Gramsie’s commandments, was cloying and conformist.

The funny thing is that, as Gramsie resigned herself to the truth that I would never be a Ralph Lauren poster child, I began to warm to the idea that maybe I could. That after all, it was another part of me. It seemed easier in some way, if ultimately, unattainable. Maybe that was the aspirational spirit she’d been fighting to embed in me. The optical illusion of ease. Something I’d never had at home in California. Maybe I could have it now.

Today, I live in New York City in my thirties. Maybe it’s maturity or sheer lack of energy, but I long to be cleaner and slicker. I’m ready for a more streamlined wardrobe, but still fear total cohesion. Something in me still fights for that wild raw expression that is no longer necessary.

For so long, I felt like giving in to Gramsie would be selling out. But looking back, I see that in some ways, long after I was able to by my own sixty-dollar Adidas, keeping a mismatched closet and outspoken commitment to budget shopping was my way of trying to pass for less. If to no one else but myself.

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