What We Were Buying

Two thousand and twelve. You had money and nowhere to put it—the banks were lying, the taxes were eating it—so you spent it on things instead.

The Nokia Lumia 920 was the first real alternative to Apple that actually mattered. They were still doing the fake-leather design thing, treating phones like they wanted to be leather wallets. Windows Phone went the other direction—bright tiles, hard angles, actually digital. Choosing one felt like you’d figured something out.

Nike and Dover Street Market made a special Air Force 1 for the 30-year anniversary. Limited, white, supposedly waterproof, tied to the 1948 Olympics, the first after the war. That narrative-making—you were buying the story as much as the shoe.

Lana Del Rey was Woman of the Year on magazine covers, mostly naked, and the writing about her was crude and horny. People were obsessed with her as this broken California image, this girl who’d let you photograph her however. She was interesting in a way most pop moments aren’t—something about it felt real, which is probably the cruelest thing you can say about celebrity culture.

A Bathing Ape put old Street Fighter sprites on t-shirts. The nostalgia play so obvious it barely registered, but everyone wanted them anyway. The culture was converting the eighties and nineties into essential merchandise, childhood packaged as product.

Urban Outfitters was where you’d spend an afternoon walking past people who’d figured out the look. The right hair, the right bands, the right irony level. The catalog was aspirational porn—beautiful people, beautiful apartments, beautiful objects. You could be that, supposedly, if you owned the right things.

This was what the year tasted like. The objects meant something, or you had to believe they did.