Teens Who Play The Money Game

by Fern Kupfer

WHAT COULD BE more fun than an afternoon spent shopping with a teenage girl? I don't know. A few things come to mind. Traveling on a plane with the stomach flu? Doing your taxes? Having root canal?

Once I was in a mall in California with a 14-year-old in search of the perfect jeans. Probably it would have been easier to find the golden-egg-laying goose. We were on vacation. "Sure," I said, feeling relaxed. "You want to do a little shopping? Why not?" Why not, even though the California sky was cloudless and the stores were the same as the ones we have in Iowa, the same stores that are in Every Mall, USA.

Sometime that afternoon, everything started to blend into a sea of denim, the 501's indistinguishable from the 502's, the petite or regular, the slim / baggy / relaxed-fit / ankle-cropped / button-downed / fly-front / stone-washed / preshrunk - nothing made sense anymore. I began to lose all sense of time and space and became one of those dutiful Stepford Moms, bringing in load after load of jeans to an increasingly unhappy daughter. Nothing fit. Nothing was right. Gabi was awkward as a colt, with long, lean legs and a waist still childishly thick. But surely there were other 14-year-old girls with this body? Surely the makers of jeans knew this and there would be one brand, one style, one size that fit? Back and forth I went, dressing room to rack, rack to dressing room. Even the perky little Gap-helpers had given up all hope.

There was a point - I should be ashamed to admit this, but surely many mothers have fallen this low - that I would have paid anything for jeans that made my daughter look in the mirror, smile and say "perfect!" Once I actually did pay more for a pair of jeans than would be needed to provide a year's milk for an entire village. I know there is no defense for such an abrogation of values. Just let me say that anyone who has not gone shopping for jeans with a teenager who is uncomfortable with her body should not cast the first stone.

Megan, my older stepdaughter, has spent a couple of years cultivating the grunge look: faded T-shirts, jeans with lots of skin peeping through, scuffed boots from Prussian army surplus. One would think that dressing this way is easy. You buy used clothes. You don't wash them often. You coordinate your day's wardrobe around what's on the floor by your bed from the night before.

And yet, shopping with Megan is difficult. What is cool and what is not cool remains a mystery in this fashion genre. I have been in stores and picked out T-shirts with logos of snarling, androgynous musicians that looked to me quite similiar to other T-shirts of Megan's. "You like this?" I say. Megan shakes her head, scornful as if I were holding up a white blouse and navy blazer. Megan picks out a little retro number - pointy collar, shiny polyester, polka-dots, something I gave away with all my disco clothes in the '70s. "Well, if you like it," I say, my face a mask of repose. Megan comes out of the dressing room in something black with chains. "Isn't this cool?" she exclaims. I agree that metal often is.

One year Megan wore only black: black tattered tights, black long skirts, black turtlenecks. I recall that all her Christmas presents under the tree that year were black (except maybe for the pajamas; although I did look, I couldn't find any black flannel pajamas). All of Megan's friends also wore black, and sometimes, leaving the house, those girls dressed in shades from ebony to dusty charcoal reminded me of a parade of youthful mourners.

I have often gone shopping with Megan and come back without a thing. That is because Megan, at heart, is not a shopper. She has a kind of anthropological view of clothing that I find rather endearing. That is clothing as artifact. She becomes attached to certain clothes and would never part with them. This is the shirt she wore on her 10th birthday when she went to Adventureland. That is the nightgown she used to play princess in when she and her Dad lived in the house on Curtiss Street. This is the T-shirt from the Jane's Addiction concert. These articles of clothing are not only keepsakes - Megan wears them. It is true that her ensembles at various times have appeared worn and oddly ill-fitting.

Katie, 16, defines her fashion statement as "classic." What she means is class consumer. Designer brands. Labels. Good stuff. She doesn't like to shop in discount stores. She says discount stores "smell funny."

Soon it will be spring, and that means time to shop for a prom dress. That also means many trips out of town. Funny, I have brought up three teenage girls and have never been able to convince them to buy a dress for a special event in the same town in which we live. The appeal of the dress always seems in direct proportion to the distance of the mall. (As a resident of central Iowa, I live a scant four hours from Minneapolis, home to the Mall of America. It is my intention to live a long and full life without ever going there.)

The perfect prom dress, like the perfect pair of jeans, is something that exists only in the fantasy world of soft-drink ads and magazine fashion spreads. In real life, prom dresses are always too fluffy or too slinky or too something ridiculous. To my mind, prom dresses make young girls look like either ice-cream parfaits or teen hookers.

Prom dresses are also too much money. The wastrel in me who gave up caring about the cost as long as the jeans fit does not come forth in the formal-wear section. You wear jeans. Then you wear them again and again. But prom dresses will clog the back of the closet for years to come.

I'm a good sport. This season we'll do a mall or two or three. I can do jeans, spring clothes, even prom dresses and endure. I'll pull out the plastic and say, "Charge it!" I know the real test of the relationship starts sometime later in the season when - my heart drops at just the thought - the girls and I begin shopping for bathing suits.

Fern Kupfer is a novelist and writing professor at Iowa State University. She is a frequent contributor to Working Moms' Internet Refuge.

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