Deck the halls with stacks of catalogs, falalalala, lalalala. Also, the bathroom, the kitchen, the laundry and, while we’re at it, the bedside table, now topped with a tower of seasonal consumption literature.
‘Tis the season of excess, when retailers attempt to transform passive resisters into all-in enthusiasts through the mail, online or on ground.
Long labeled “wish books,” holiday gift catalogs have an uncanny knack of transforming objects you never thought you wanted into Things You Cannot Live Without. They scratch the itch that wasn’t there.
These seasonal tomes are the triumph of style and stylists over the real repositories of desire, not necessity. Hence, there’s no need for a wish book featuring black socks or scissors.
Unless … they’re Neiman Marcus black Nordic print cashmere socks or the Best Made Company’s Sheffield Kevlar Shears ($76), the latter arriving complete with their own origin story, like some superhero.
Last year, 12,513 distinct catalog publications were produced in the United States, as tallied by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), and 11.1 million copies were mailed (possibly 2 million to your home). The number of mailed catalogs peaked at 19.6 million in 2007, right before the recession, and has declined since, in part because of the increase in online marketing.
But merchants still believe that the dead-wood wish book works wonders in getting people to shop, in the stores and online. “Catalogs are the best interpretation of the brand outside the brick-and-mortar store,” says DMA’s Neil O’Keefe. “Those pages have the best ability to convey the look and appeal. They’re more lifestyle and aspirational. That is a goal. You’re not going to have that same feeling from an email or website.”
These compendiums of longing are not tossed together like salad but edited and refined to reflect what we’re consuming now. And despite the variety of companies, they have a strikingly shared vision of what we should be buying this holiday season.
Such as a Chilean mine’s worth of copper products. It’s as if the poobahs of catalogs held a confab and decided that we all need copper mugs for our Moscow Mules (a vodka, ginger beer and lime concoction) on a matching copper tray.
Taking a cue from the granddaddy of all explanatory brochures, J. Peterman, a fairy tale of consumption festooned with illustrations instead of photos, some catalogs feel the need to explain their curious vision over and over again, with little subtlety.
A winner this season is Cuyana, which marries the current trend of “fewer, better gifts” with surrealist art. Apparently, Cuyana means “to love” in Quechua, the language of the central Andes, although the company is based in San Francisco and inspired by the Belgian painter Rene Magritte.
Someone at Cuyana had the twee notion of basing the catalog on Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe underlined by the sentence “This is not a pipe” in French. Page after page reads “This is not a catalog,” “This is not a tote,” “This is not a wallet.” Well, you get the point. Which is to make consumers take a longer look at a nice, streamlined — if unremarkable — collection of leather goods.
Best Made Company, the online catalog purveyor of the aforementioned Sheffield Kevlar Shields, eschews understatement right there in its name. This Web destination, along with The Field Outfitting Co., appeals to your inner glamper in a decidedly outward acquisitional manner: a $118 flask, an $8,000 coyote fur throw and — why not? — a comprehensive collection of axes. Just what you wanted: A $300 Hushabye Baby American Felling Axe with “24 page axe manual, a bridle leather blade guard and an embroidered badge.”
A few years ago, apparently based on some unilateral agreement that Americans were seriously lacking monograms, retailers decided that any gewgaw that could be mailed, toted or gifted was worthy of an emphatic initial or three. And so Mark and Graham was birthed, with an origin story that drops a tonnage of names (Gutenberg, Vuitton, Napoleon) in the pursuit of “next-generation personalization.”
Why does a deck of cards or a $250 “little bit hipster and a little bit rustic” cardigan need personalizing? Instead of Portlandia’s “Put a Bird On It,” Mark and Graham want to put a “B” on it. The company will personally brand all the season’s big trends: copper barware, plaid (which may look less comely in May) and — yes — totes, in suede, leather, herringbone, waxed canvas, camo.
A glossy tome from Frontgate, for the people who have one, arrives with the credo “outfitting America’s finest homes since 1991.” The target audience appears to be homeowners for whom more than enough is apparently not.
The $1,699 10-foot Natural SeriesT Christmas tree, which is nothing of the sort, comes already strung with lights. The Luxury Mahogany Pet Residence Dog Crate is yours for $499 to $599 (but free crate pad!).
Frontgate has a thing for “outdoor living” and is a leading advocate of that most curious aesthetic development, the outdoor rug. Isn’t the lawn an outdoor rug?
The RH Modern catalog almost knocked down the frontgate upon arrival. It offers more than 500 pages of austere modern furnishings styled in mausoleum-like settings where, it appears, nary a coffee cup dare tread. RH Modern comes from Restoration Hardware, which has nothing to do with hardware or the Restoration. We don’t know who, precisely, drunk-dials a $5,320 leather sofa without a test drive, but RH must know more than we do, or why else would these Britannicas of design arrive with such frightening regularity?
Karen Heller is a staff writer for The Washington Post.
There it is — the $300 ax you never knew you wanted
