Prompt No. 3: We Schlep!
This is the final installment on prep. The first tackled prep style, this one tackles the lifestyle. I’m surprisingly bored of this topic now. I hope to never address it again.
Over the past two weeks, much has been said of Tom Wambsgans’ takedown of cousin Greg’s date, Bridget, and her “ludicrously capacious” bag, the $2,890 Burberry Vintage Title Check Leather Satchel. According to The Guardian:
“Her clothing – and worst of all her ‘monstrous’ bag – signifies that she is not part of their world. ‘What’s even in there?’ Tom laments. ‘Flat shoes for the subway? Her lunch pail? It’s gargantuan. You could take it camping. You could slide it across the floor after a bank job’. Bridget’s excess baggage hints at everything she lacks, and everything the Roys and their ilk are accustomed to. Bridget lives in a world where she has to schlep. The Roys simply glide.”
There is something particularly hilariously appropriate about the styling of this product image from Neiman Marcus.
It’s apt that Tom serves as the messenger:
“What makes the scene even more cutting is that this observation of conspicuous consumption comes from Tom, the original Roy family interloper. An aspiring scion-in-law who used to wear red chinos and, at one stage, found himself berated for wearing a branded Moncler vest to a Davos-esque media conference. ‘Nice vest, Wambsgans,’ quipped Roman. ‘It’s so puffy. What’s it stuffed with, your hopes and dreams?’”
However, while Tom has learned the dress code, he remains an obvious outsider in his needing to narrate his understanding of this monied world. Had Tom matriculated from Philips Academy (even on scholarship!) he would know to communicate disdain through only a glance and a pinched smile. He would also know that the chinos ought to be a particular shade of red (Nantucket), and the vest, a quilted cashmere down gilet (by Brunello Cucinelli).
This is what every “low-key rich bitch wardrobe” article and “old money style” TikTok misses — for those seeking to embrace the preppy lifestyle, looking the part is not nearly enough. Ask any middle class kid of color getting bused in to their private school: there is a uniform, yet somehow everyone knows who belongs and who does not. There it comes in the form of “lifers”, students who have attended from pre-kindergarten or kindergarten through 12th grade. These students have parents who do not need to research the best schools in the area — they already know because they themselves were lifers, graduating in the same navy blazer and khakis in 1972 before clapping from the audience for their own children.
What is your last name, though?
I began private school in third grade, a perverse point of pride by senior year. As one of a handful of non-white students with double-digit years behind their name in my yearbook, I did not feel a sense of accomplishment, but belonging. I could recite the general prologue of Canterbury Tales and sing along to Smells Like Teen Spirit. I navigated the manicured minefield that is attending private school with the children of the 1% and unwittingly learned how to navigate their parents, as well. Stack an oddly thin, tattered magazine called “New Yorker” in the bathroom; have a pink newspaper (Financial Times) haphazardly strewn on kitchen island. Masterpiece should coo from an egregiously old television in the study and Mozart concertos must quaver from the Volvo.
Years later, in interviewing for a job on Capitol Hill, a U.S. Senator asked where I attended high school; he was quite familiar — his daughters were in Upper School there. The interview ended shortly thereafter and I would start work on Monday. Over the next decade I would rely heavily on the unofficial education private school afforded: reading the right publications and books ensured I never felt lost in conversation — even having the correct preference in wine impressed a certain set, sparing everyone the embarrassment of the sole black person requesting a glass of moscato. Understanding the field so thoroughly became a form of social capital that separated me from the rest; a currency I subsequently flung about, like Wambsgans, to let everyone know I knew the rules. That is until I realized that separation only served to benefit the whiteness it inevitably centered.
There is no incident to point to where it all clicked; just a reckoning that the social capital came with an assumed respectability on my part. I would not question or challenge their understanding of the world, thus maintaining (if not fortifying) their power and privilege. Like Tom, how could I challenge anything when I am not occupying this rarified space on equal footing, rather present to do the work the powerful and wealthy either refuse to do or have never had to do themselves.
This continued and rather stayed discourse on prep, classic style and quiet luxury operates in the same manner. Content that fails to critically question our obsession with the varying forms of monied life and style further promotes and centers it as a goal worthy of pursuit rather than the perversive way in which we all deprive ourselves of creativity, culture, equality and self-expression.
Let’s lean into the schlep.
But first, play this Prompt’s playlist for the full effect.
This spring, A Sunday Journal examines our attachment to the stories we tell — what we believe luxury communicates, whether millennials have killed the guest and writer’s room, and how model minority status makes for brutal observations.
Until then, there’s Prompt — the accompanying biweekly newsletter.
ACQUISITIONS.
ACQUISITIONS.
In preparing to attend Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour, I found myself taking a second, third and fourth glance at designers I thought would never have a home in my closet. With a wardrobe so firmly rooted in classic style, I thought it would be a challenge to incorporate items that channel the kinetic energy of “I’M THAT GIRL” and “AMERICA HAS A PROBLEM” in a way that feels true to my sense of style. But what I may have uncovered is a shift in personal style.
With classic style trending I have grown a bit tired of seeing the same pieces styled the same way on every other creator’s page (R.I.P. Khaite Danielle jeans) and while I try not to succumb to hyper-individualism, I do feel the need to shake things up a little bit when I start to feel as though I look like every one else. The confluence of eye-rolling and event dressing led me to Christa Bösch and Cosima Gadient’s Ottolinger.
The trick is to look at individual pieces rather than head-to-toe styling. This allows for the shopper to easily identify connections to their existing wardrobe rather than feel overwhelmed by an aesthetic they may not fully embody.
My picks (from one of my favorite shops, Assembly New York) to convey interest and edge within an otherwise classic repertoire below:
