The scorners and the doomsayers, however, miss the soul of the matter — and also an opportunity.

Intentionally or not, tariffs appear to be making cheap imported stuff more expensive. At least, this is the consensus among the critics. The reciprocal tariff chart may have broken the commentariat with its crudeness as an expression of economic policy, but it had a certain rough elegance in terms of identifying stuff that’s too cheap and making it cost more. It has been weird to watch the resistance to this idea, since stemming the flood of made-for-landfill consumer goods has long been a popular talking point for the Leftists and environmentalists who oppose Trump.

It’s an article of faith for these people — and I’m one of them — that our limitless appetite for disposable consumer goods from China and the developing world shortchanges domestic workers, underwrites brutal labor regimes abroad, and is morally and environmentally reprehensible. A globalized food system is unsustainable and undesirable, and so on. It has been funny to see the about-face as we demand our low-cost Chinese goods and wintertime raspberries.

For example, Rue Saint Paul, a “sustainable collective” clothing boutique in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, near where I live, prides itself on sourcing its garments from brands with ethical labor standards. The “about us” section on the shop’s website claims that “guided by our sustainable values… our mission is to help reduce the fashion industry’s environmental footprint, promote ethical manufacturing, and drive responsible and circular consumption.”

Yet shortly after Liberation Day, Kelly Wang, the Rue Saint Paul owner, took to Instagram to lament the tariffs’ disastrous potential consequences for her business and to say, sarcastically: “But surely you can unwind decades old global supply chains in a week, new US factories will be opening tomorrow, millions of new jobs will be created instantaneously, prices of domestically made goods will be cheaper, and all of our paychecks will double. It will all be GREAT again.” Does Wang really think that the global supply chain is awesome, and that we should get everything we want “tomorrow” or “instantaneously,” or else it’s not worth it? The stance is at odds with the brand’s ethos.

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Wang did not return my calls by deadline, but she spoke to the website Gothamist to further explain the negative effects the tariffs would have on her business. Surprisingly for a sustainable boutique in the white-hot “shop-local” center of Brooklyn, 70% of Rue Saint Paul’s merchandise comes from abroad, including its best-selling item, a pair of “two-toned, color blocked” trousers made in China, that currently sell for $200 and will have to be priced at closer to $400 once Wang has to restock them at a higher price. (This is assuming that the Chinese manufacturers won’t eat the price difference, as Trump promises).

Rue Saint Paul offers meaningful and original sustainability initiatives — it allows shoppers to “rent” clothing for short periods of time, and it offers “buybacks” on its wares once you’re done with them. Yet like almost all high-end, ethical businesses, these values mask its promotion of a fundamentally unchanged consumerism. The obvious most-sustainable option would be for Brooklyn women — not a demographic with small wardrobes — to buy fewer pairs of color-blocked pants. Making them cost $400 instead of $200 doesn’t seem like such a terrible idea.

This idea comes to mind frequently when reading about tariffs and the impossibility of manufacturing in America. The Smarter Scrubber grill brush guy explains his failed quest to entirely source and make a grill brush locally — he tried, and it can’t be done; we don’t have the manufacturing capacity for one of the parts. Elsewhere, a manufacturer explains that he can fabricate the plastic parts for his custom department-store coat hangers locally but can’t get the metal hooks.

One can’t help but think of the vast number of hangers and grill brushes already in existence, all destined for landfills due to the lack of secondary markets. We have enough grill brushes and hangers for 1,000 years, if only we could reuse the ones in existence. Second-hand dealers, incidentally, expect tariffs to be good for them. One such merchant I spoke with, Kevin Walla, co-owner with his father of A Perfect Piece consignment business in Manchester, Vermont, noted uncertainties about the market but was generally expecting an uptick in sales within a six- to 12-month timeframe. “From a green perspective,” he says “buying second hand means less carbon released from the production of new items.” During the 15-year run of his business, Walla has “consistently” seen greater supply of second-hand goods than demand for them. Imagine if that could change.

Sustainability advocates have often made the austerity argument when it comes to animal proteins: meat is resource-intensive, and to produce it ethically is expensive, so the price should reflect reality, and we should eat meat sparingly. Another endangered business mentioned in the Gothamist story is Aqua Best Seafood, which “services 80% of the Michelin-star restaurants in New York City” with items like salmon from Norway, branzino from Turkey, dorade from Greece and red snapper from Japan. Will Michelin diners still be able to get their imported fish at a good price post-tariff? Well, should they be able to?

A cookbook I like very much, One Pot, Pan, Planet, by Anna Jones, instructs its readers to “consider food miles” when making our purchases, and to consider eating fresh, seasonal foods mostly when they’re in season. Higher prices on imported luxury fish would probably turn such products into what they ought to be in the first place: a splurge and an indulgence.

There are many obvious objections to this line of thinking, including that it’s not really what Trump says he’s trying to do, and that the massive recession from less consumption would be so devastating that we’d regret we tried it, no matter what our values. There’s also the argument that higher prices unfairly affect people with lower incomes, who spend a greater proportion of their money on basic goods, and can least afford the increases.

To this, it seems essential to point out that a large share of the Walmart demographic voted for Trump, and has shown considerable loyalty to him. They might — might — be open to undergoing economic pain for a perceived good cause down the road. Low-income people are also the ones disproportionately affected by our addiction to cheap, ill-made goods — they’re the ones with the awful Amazon delivery and DoorDash jobs; they’re the ones who suffer most when the made-in-China backpack breaks the first week.

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The most reasonable consensus seems to be that the American “manufacturing jobs” the Trump voters long for won’t fix these problems — we’ll never beat the likes of China and Vietnam, and much of this labor will be done by robots now anyway. But it also might be true that Trump’s voters don’t really want “manufacturing jobs” in the sense that they have a burning need to mine coal or operate a robot arm. The term might stand in for stable, well-paid, meaningful work and goods that don’t suck. And these goals, actually, align with those of their cultural opponents. Surely this is an opportunity for significant reform of a universally hated system.

Katrina Caspelich, the CEO of Re/Make World, a nonprofit devoted to climate justice and fair pay in the clothing industry believes that tariffs will bring us further from these goals. She believes that large, fast-fashion brands — 100 billion new garments produced each year, most ending up in landfills within a few years — will be able to evade the tariffs by moving their production around quickly, and already-marginalized garment workers abroad will be the ones to bear the real costs. Small businesses like Wang’s, engaged in “thoughtful production and long-term supplier relationships,” won’t survive, Caspelich thinks, while fast fashion will.

Maybe, but Re/Make, among other initiatives, challenges its supporters to do a 90-day #NoNewClothes fast that will “reduce your carbon footprint,” “keep your money out of the pockets of exploitative companies,” and “limit waste you send to a landfill” — basically, just don’t shop for three months. Such initiatives are virtuous in theory, but obviously in practice haven’t changed consumer habits. Tariffs just might.

Maggie Bullock, author of The Kingdom of Prep, on the other hand, went all-in on style after she left the American South to attend boarding school. In her book, which covers “the rise and fall of J.Crew”, she examines the history of the company that enabled her to quickly dress in the preppy style of her classmates: flat-front trousers, polo shirts, roll-neck sweaters. A well-worn roll-neck sweater, Bullock writes with nostalgic affection, “had social acceptance knit into its very fibres”.

Like America, J.Crew sold a paradoxical dream: the top tier of society is exclusive, but anyone can reach it. Its products aped those of Ralph Lauren, Brooks Brothers, and J.Press — whose name J.Crew emulated — but retailed for a fraction of the cost. The clothes were still pricey, but could be thought of as an affordable investment; the company was aspirational, certainly, but it wasn’t exclusionary. That is, unless you happened to be a woman who wore a size larger than 12 or a man who wore “XXL” shirts, although the company redressed its skinny-bias in the more obese world of the 2010s.

Indeed, what J.Crew was selling evolved in tandem with American society. At its point of inception, in 1983, clothing retailers played a critical role in the capital-powered construction of self. And J.Crew offered a ready-to-wear identity: a beginner’s guide to prep for those who quickly needed to ingratiate themselves to the establishment. Initially, the company was catalogue-only, but during the late Eighties, founder Arthur Cinader’s daughter Emily steered its expansion into the indoor mall — the place of American identity creation during this period. Being able to buy the prep look straight from a catalogue had been an innovation, but taking it to the mall, where you could browse identities between stops at the food court and the arcade, was a critical next step in expanding J.Crew’s reach.  

But the early 2000s saw the beginning of the end of the American indoor mall — with many older malls built in the Seventies and Eighties being abandoned — and so, too, the decline of this iteration of J.Crew. As the company struggled with its identity, young consumers turned elsewhere, particularly to Abercrombie & Fitch. In 2002, I was hired to manage an A&F store at the Streets of Southpoint Mall — one of the elaborate, indoor-outdoor mega-malls that appeared during this period of rapid mall consolidation. At the time, A&F was doubling down on a truly exclusionary aesthetic, marketing clothes solely to people hot enough to wear them. Only a very particular kind of cool young person belonged in our clothes; I was exhorted not to hire anyone who didn’t fit the bill. (When the tide turned, a swarm of online identities — pro-social justice, pro-size acceptance — made A&F something of a punchline.)

The American Dream is a constant quest for an identity that is both recognisable and exceptional, and the divergent paths of J.Crew and A&F expose this seesaw between inclusivity and exclusivity. The Ronald Reagan-overseen Eighties, the true heyday of J.Crew, still held the promise of upward mobility and material success for all. Everyone was invited. Meanwhile, the 2000s were a time of economic retrenchment, eventually leading to the major recession of 2008. The elite felt threatened, and needed to differentiate itself, even superficially, through something like the vision A&F was selling. The effect of economics on the identity of Americans played out through off-the-rack fashion; it seems as if Americans are forever in high school, anxiously buying new looks to fit in with whichever lunch table they find themselves sitting at. This never-ending quest for identity and belonging speaks to a deep-seated, uncomfortable need to navigate the complexities of American society, where class, race, and personal identity intertwine and continuously evolve.

This incessant buying and selling of the product-mediated self fascinated me long before I entered a high school refectory. It probably began with my father, who wore the same half-dozen ill-fitting Brooks Brothers Number One Sack Suits all through his four-decade career as a car dealer. He considered anyone who linked their identity to branded material goods — whether Ford, Chrysler or J.Crew garments — to be susceptible to manipulation by the rapacious, advertising-driven economy. What he sold were ephemeral dreams: were you a Chevy man, an Oldsmobile man, a Cadillac man? The answer didn’t matter to him — they were all quick-to-depreciate “hunks of junk” — but it was this question that could motivate uncertain people to fork out their life savings. Everyone in America wants to be someone else, someone different and better; we can be easily convinced to invest hard-earned money in ourselves.

J.Crew experienced a revival in the mid-2000s and 2010s, when it became the preferred clothing brand for Barack and Michelle Obama. It had managed to successfully blend its old Ivy League staples with hipster trends, but this was J.Crew’s last big money: where could identity formation go in post-racial, post-class, post-patriarchy America? The answer, we would eventually learn, was online, where the process of branded self-differentiation was able to remain in dizzying flux.

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I never imagined — and neither, apparently, did the executives at J.Crew and A&F, even as their billion-dollar brands began to struggle — that high-quality clothing would cease to play such a fundamental role in defining a person. The internet introduced a thousand new ways to form an identity, with Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok allowing users to continuously evolve. Some retail companies kept up, at first. Fast fashion companies such as Zara and H&M fuelled a retail apocalypse by churning out new wearable identities in response to viral articles and much-liked Instagram posts. By the end of the 2010s, if a certain influencer was wearing a particular designer shirt, Zara could have a cheap equivalent in its stores a week later.

But eventually, material possessions like clothing became less important in shaping identity, as digital profiles and online avatars took centre-stage — especially with the advent of lockdowns, Zoom meetings and fully remote existences. In this world, upon encountering someone else’s identity marker, the desire to adopt it as part of one’s own “personal brand” could be instantaneously satisfied; adding pronouns to one’s online “bio” is even faster than Amazon Prime. Even the speediest fast fashion purveyor can’t construct you an identity as quickly as a few mouse clicks or carefully angled selfies.

And material products are vulnerable. They rip, and tear and shrink in the wash. Pronouns endure, until the split second you decide to change them. The countless “skins” that can be purchased for your League of Legends characters won’t fade, but can be easily swapped on or off. Each signifies something supposedly unique about the skin buyer, who might have spent hundreds of dollars on these trifles. Pronouns are free but increasingly, in the virtual world, as in the material one, identity is for sale. And clothing companies like J.Crew and A&F cannot compete. While a garment may convey a message, its impact is limited, compared to a video of your freshly-filtered face that gets thousands of likes, or an announcement of your new pronouns that is met with widespread yet ephemeral approval.

Our pursuit of branded identities is a curious one: we are seeking uniqueness in the context of comfortable conformity, looking for the “right stuff” to distinguish us enough to join the clique of our choice. By providing affordable, aspirational style, J.Crew may have democratised fashion to some extent, but even when worn by the Obamas, it also subtly reinforced the class distinctions that are so deeply ingrained in American society. The wearers we are seeking to emulate are, in turn, seeking to appear more like us. But they are in fact part of an American upper class whose true markers of distinctions are subtle or deliberately obscure. A&F, at least, was frank about the existence of an obscure qualification to enter the elite that some will never attain. But online, it’s easy to forget that the carefully-curated versions of ourselves are often amplifying social divisions, pre-existing biases and class structures — rather than challenging them.

What the story of J.Crew teaches us is that our constructed styles, and by extension our constructed selves, are always on the way out. Their expiration dates are getting closer, and the periods of planned obsolescence shorter. The time-limited high school experience serves as an apt metaphor. Individuals strive for both self-expression and acceptance by conforming to an accepted aesthetic, and hundreds of high school movies have ended with characters achieving this tightrope walk. But in reality, it’s impossible to simultaneously break out as a unique individual and be accepted by the masses for adhering to a specific set of rules. Ultimately, our continuous reinvention of style highlights the fact that social politics always reduces, as in high school, to perpetual insecurity.