Field Guide to the Materialist: She's Gotta Have It

By Amy Rosenberg

Things! There is little that Victoria Frances enjoys more than thinking about, looking at, and acquiring them. As an editor at a Manhattan-based interior-design magazine, Frances (not her full name) sits at her desk all week, flipping through catalogs in search of lamp shades, pillows, and candelabra to borrow for photo shoots. On Saturdays, she shops. "I start at 10 o'clock," she says, "and I do what I call 'The Four B's'—Barney's, Bendel's, Bergdorf's, and Bloomies."

For the past decade or so, Frances has spent thousands of dollars a week on clothes, shoes, home accessories, jewelry, and furniture. Pleasure with possessions remains integral to her sense of self: "I love to be surrounded by beautiful and exotic things," she says.

Frances is an unabashed materialist, a high-end version of the mildly object-obsessed masses in our capitalist society. The pressure to buy and acquire, after all, surrounds all but the most isolated Americans. Moreover, everything from our sneakers to our salad dressing telegraphs something about who we are to the world. "The main way we present our self-image is through stuff," says Tim Kasser, associate professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and author of The High Price of Materialism.

Frances is all too aware of how her love for objects is tied up with a long-held desire to adopt a certain identity and social status. "Starting in college, I probably wanted to appear like the kids I was going to school with—rich and WASPy," she says. "When you're really insecure there is nothing worse than appearing different—you just want to go unnoticed and appear to be the same."

But adorning yourself and your home with the latest and greatest may offer no more than fleeting glee. "Buying stuff doesn't seem to make even materialistic people happy," Kasser says. A materialistic lifestyle is associated with an inadequate sense of security, competence, relatedness, and autonomy, he's found. In addition to perpetual feelings of ennui, the materialist runs the risk of burgeoning into a full-blown shopaholic, a person so obsessed with buying that they fall into debt and suffer dire personal consequences. A recent Stanford University study found that about 5.5 percent of men and 6 percent of women fit the criteria.

Ever the extremist, Frances is taking dramatic steps to stop herself from sinking too deep into her own materialism. This year she plans to quit her job, travel around India, and move to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to spend time skiing and volunteering. "I'm going out there with the primary purpose of not shopping," she says. "I think it will be a wonderful feeling to shed all of the symbolic artifacts that clog, distort, and sway people's perceptions of me. I think it will be cathartic." The turning point came when she received a gift she refers to as her Jeep Cherokee—a handbag that costs as much as that iconic SUV (yes, literally). When friends and co-workers began ogling her new possession, Frances suddenly realized she was embarrassed to own it. "First of all, nothing that small should cost that much," she says. "And second of all, there are so many better uses for the money. The whole thing started making me sick."