A Better Way of Buying—And Wanting—Things
A new book argues that we should honor our material desires rather than feeling ashamed of them.
It can seem, these days, like we are meant to be constantly acquiring things while also constantly getting rid of them. Mass consumption is everywhere—endless online shopping; always a new iPhone or device—as is the reactionary minimalist ethos that demands that we declutter our lives. But the relationships we have with our things tend to be more complicated than either of those extremes allow. Objects are more than just the sum of their parts. I would never give up my copies of my grandmother’s cookbooks. I’m also not going to quit my search for the perfect pair of jeans. I remember a great outfit, and what I did in it, for a long time.
The writer Katy Kelleher is seemingly no different. In her debut book, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, she seeks to understand both her collector’s impulse and her longing “for more, always more, even when I know I already have enough.” A magpie’s nest of research and anecdotes about the objects that attract her, the book examines the tension she feels between wanting the things she wants—clothes, cosmetics, home goods—and acknowledging the murkier story of how some of those items were made and marketed. “I’ve never found an object,” she writes, “that was untouched by the depravity of human greed or unblemished by the chemical undoings of time.”
Still, Kelleher smartly opts to explore the impulse to buy rather than moralizing about it. The book manages to celebrate the enjoyable objects in our lives even as it parses their dark side: At one point, Kelleher movingly recalls realizing that the prospect that she “might see or hold something beautiful” gets her out of bed in the morning during bad bouts of the depression she has lived with for many years. For her, the point of thinking deeply about materialism is not to deny ourselves the things we might yearn for, or to live in a state of constant self-judgment. Instead she suggests a third way of wanting: one that involves both understanding our desires and taking pleasure in the sensation of desiring.
Sharing Kelleher’s taste is not a prerequisite for reading her book. Her intellectual range and propensity for research, which here includes interviews with perfume makers and lingerie experts, allow readers to approach her work with curiosity regardless of their interests. Having some common points of reference helps, though. While I read a chapter on orchids with detached intrigue, I reacted powerfully to chapters addressing desires I also harbor: for a new dress I don’t need, a nicely set dining-room table, or an engagement ring.
Such visceral connections underscore her argument. Throughout the book, Kelleher wrestles with the impact that her identity—white, female, professional class, married to a man—has on her taste. I share these same aspects of Kelleher’s identity (with the caveat that I am Jewish and she is not) and her interrogatory attitude toward it. I got married not long ago, shortly after moving to a city where I hope to settle, and was struck by the way each of these events set off a wave of materialistic longing. I was skeptical of the wedding industry, maybe even of marriage as an institution, yet I wanted my wedding, and my new home, to be beautiful. I assembled my wedding registry in a haze of desire and shame. I desired the objects I chose so much, but didn’t want to admit that I desired them. A handful of friends complimented the registry itself, calling it “chic” or “stylish.” My pleasure at their praise remains bright, yet mortifies me still.
In part, my embarrassment and enjoyment came from a dizzying sense of my own maturation. Without quite noticing, I had turned from a 20-something who hunted for sneaker bargains on eBay into a grown woman who read House & Garden. Kelleher has undergone the same transformation, and sees enough power in it that she has chosen to embrace it. “As I’ve grown from girl to teen to woman,” she writes, “I’ve come to finally appreciate the beauties of domestic life and community rituals.” For her, and for me, investing in a home is a shift toward emotional investment in family, both blood and chosen. (It’s not a coincidence that reading Kelleher made me quite conscious of my domestic Jewishness. Halfway through, I glanced up, glad to see my bookshelves full of Primo Levi and Isaiah Berlin, my walls covered in ads for very Jewish movies that I’d eagerly spent extra money to get framed professionally.)
Kelleher’s faith in the value of domesticity—and in the idea that, as the novelist and housekeeping expert Cheryl Mendelson puts it, “no one is too superior or intelligent to care for hearth and home”—makes her appraisal of household objects especially compelling. She values the effort she puts into taking care of her home, while understanding the corrosive effects of fantasizing too much about how she’d like to look, which is often a way of fantasizing about wealth.
She also questions her desire for items with dark manufacturing histories. In one striking example, she interrogates her love of the flowered Czech dishes she inherited and then realized bear some resemblance to ones that belonged to Hitler’s companion, Eva Braun. This discovery comes from her research on porcelain, which has already led to the discovery that some Jews incarcerated at Dachau had to work at a factory called Porzellan Manufaktur Allach, making art objects and dinner plates sold to wealthy Germans. Unsurprisingly, this porcelain was distributed with noxious ideological intent; also unsurprisingly, neo-Nazis collect it now. One Allach statuette, the Fencer, depicts a white “muscled youth, shirtless, leaning on his épée”; a line from the first Allach catalog read, “White porcelain is the embodiment of the German soul.”
Kelleher considers forcing herself to reject porcelain. Getting rid of her inherited Czech plates, which now remind her of “Braun’s disgusting dish,” could feel good. But it would be “false and futile—wasteful too.” She chooses instead to look squarely at the story behind the plates she uses, recalling as she sets her table that her home and life are “woven into the fabric of the world and its terrible history.”
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things would be simpler and less compelling if Kelleher drew the same conclusion from each of her investigations. Instead, some of its dives into ugliness double as portraits of change. Take Kelleher’s relationship with perfume, which she has worn since her teens. In the 1990s, she liked light, fresh-smelling perfumes like CK One or Obsession that were popular at the time, because she was drawn to scents that “weren’t overtly sexual or coded as particularly feminine.” Her research, though, suggests a grim backdrop for her predilection: a broader shift in consumer behavior toward “clean” scents during and after the HIV/AIDS epidemic. After the opulent scents popular in the 1970s and ’80s, “everyone wanted to smell super clean, like hyper clean,” the perfumer Josh Meyer tells her. To many industry observers, that shift in people’s reactions underscored a “lingering cultural fear of contamination.”
Smell is powerfully associative, and Kelleher, perhaps helped along by her research, noticed her own scent preferences shifting during a different moment of crisis. In the anxious, early months of the coronavirus pandemic, Kelleher started using fragrances as “sensory anchors, ways to tether myself to the present moment.” Far from wanting to have no smell, or to wear the breezy fragrances of her youth, Kelleher found herself wanting to “smell like an experience.” She bought more perfumes as a result, seeking small perfumers and unusual formulations, and seems thoroughly comfortable with that form of accumulation. “I want to partake in this part of human culture,” she writes.
In other cases, Kelleher turns away from acquisition. During a pandemic closet clean, she found herself facing a wardrobe whose “wooden bar [was] sagging in the middle from the weight of … unworn, unloved clothes.” Her crowded closet, she continues, “feels normal to me, but it isn’t the global or historic norm.” Americans buy more clothing—and dispose of more, rather than mending it or handing it down—than ever before. Researching the garment industry has taught Kelleher to shift from “thinking about clothes as items I could want and buy [to] thinking of them as objects that were made out of labor.” Child labor, often. While standing before her closet or shopping online, Kelleher dreams of wearing something she knows was not made by a child or an exploited worker. Doing so is hardly possible without great wealth and great effort, she writes, yet that’s no reason not to try.
For Kelleher, one step is accepting that buying clothing “when one already has enough … is never going to be a virtuous act.” Another is respecting the power that clothing has over its wearers and beholders: “Textures can calm us; good clothes can ignite the libido; they can make us look professional, subversive, or even invisible.” Balancing these admissions leads her to a stance, not a solution. “I love and cherish my ability to desire,” she writes, but “I’ve found a great amount of peace in the phrase, ‘That’s enough, thanks.’”
The spirit of That’s enough, thanks suffuses Kelleher’s writing in every sense but the intellectual. It seems that she cannot learn enough, even when it could be simpler to stop learning. (Do you want to know that your plates look like Eva Braun’s?) For readers who are invested in both loving what they own and combatting their consumerist impulses, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things is an installment in the vanishingly rare and valuable genre of decidedly non-self-help books that nonetheless contain truly helpful ideas about how to live. Kelleher’s useful idea is to honor not just beauty, but wanting. By the end of the book, she has sketched a way of living in which buying an object requires need, appreciation, and knowledge of its historical, social, and ecological weight. All that research is work, of course. Maybe it should be. Doing it, I hope, will both erase my own shame about wanting beautiful things and help me buy fewer of them. Whether it will certainly seems worth finding out.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.