The Oregon Trail: 2018
A good friend of ours was celebrating his birthday in NYC and invited us along. We currently live with my parents, in anticipation of buying our first home, and we use any excuse to travel. While I love my parents, the best way I can describe it is being on a reality show that is in its sixth season but stopped being funny around the season two (Mom, if you’re reading this-I love you and thanks for molding me into a creative, good-natured member of society!). I would normally drag my husband to The Met or MoMA, but this time he got dibs on the itinerary. Supreme. A Bathing Ape. Kith. Stadium Goods. All the Hypebeast haunts.
Do you remember playing The Oregon Trail as a kid? You would set out on an adventure, faced with decision after decision: Do we ford the river? How many rations should we pack? Some disaster would befall you or a member of your party: Jebediah has dysentery. You were mauled by a bear. The wagon flipped over and all your supplies were destroyed. These were the frequent images that popped in my head as I waited in line for two hours to go into Supreme. After flying into Islip on Long Island and taking the Long Island Railroad into the city, there was a line and then another line. Just in case you wanted more lines for your lines, there was another ANOTHER LINE a few blocks away. You get your hand stamped and then you are packed together two-across. There are bouncers and NYPD police to manage the crowd. It was like some sick twist on that episode of Martin when he goes to the DMV. Every 30 minutes or so, someone would give up and step out of line-only to be replaced with a teenager and his angry parents. The temperature continued to drop, I wasn’t wearing enough layers and am pretty sure someone behind me started crying. “Now is the winter of our discontent” said William Shakespeare, as he stood in line for a Supreme fanny pack.
After some ungodly amount of time, we were finally let into the store-which was a little light on inventory to say the least. There is a theory called the Sunk-Cost Fallacy that indicates once you’ve invested a substantial amount of emotions, labor, resources and money into something, it becomes extremely difficult to abandon it. The only reason I even made a purchase is because there was no way I wasn’t leaving with something after all of that. For the record, the lavender-colored hat I got looks so cute on my bookshelf-so there’s that. If you’re wondering why there are no pictures of Supreme below, it’s because they wouldn’t allow me take pictures of anything that included clothing and fixtures, so basically the entire shop. Everyone at Kith, ABA and VFiles were really nice and accommodating though.
