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  Some, though, have found ways to lower the risk of chucking millions of dollars’ worth of clothing items every year. The Italian-owned Benetton label, for example, manufactures its entire clothing line in white. Once the clothes are delivered to distribution centers, Benneton’s analysts assess what color or length is in vogue, at which point workers dye and cut the company’s shirts, jackets, pants and infant apparel to replicate the style and color preferences popular at the time. But Benetton is the exception, not the rule, in an industry that wields less control than it would like.

  Like the cosmetics industry, fashion centers around desire, around aspiration, around the concept of transformation. “Enclothed cognition” is a psychological phenomenon that refers to the influences our clothing has on our cognitive and decision-making processes, and the ways we unconsciously adapt our behavior to the people and symbols around us. Do our voices get higher when we’re talking to a baby? Do they slow down when we address an elderly person? Do they deepen in the presence of our parents, or get higher around our pets? Does our behavior change in the presence of a police officer, a firefighter or a physician? Most of the time, the answer is yes. (Studies reveal that if we put on a white coat that we’ve been told belongs to a physician, we pay closer attention to our surroundings, but if we’re told the same white coat belongs to a painter, our attention shows no improvement at all.2)

  Enclothed cognition is a variant of a field of scientific study known as embodied cognition, that believes that “humans think not only with their brains but with their bodies,3” and that in turn, our bodies themselves can suggest various abstract concepts in our brains that affect our behavior.”4 For example, if you or I carry around a clipboard, in general we feel more important, organized and mindful of what we have to do that day. For unconscious reasons, we associate washing our hands with moral cleanliness, and we also rate people holding a cup of hot coffee as warmer and more approachable than we do people who are holding a glass of iced tea. Also, when asked to focus on an upcoming event, we tend to tilt forward in our seats, as if physically “meeting” our own futures, but we tilt discreetly backward in our seats if someone asks us to reflect on events that have already taken place.5

  Enclothed and embodied cognition are both nascent fields of psychological study, yet neither will surprise anyone who has ever bought a new article of clothing and believed it would redress issues ranging from poor self-esteem to social phobia. In fact, from the moment we open our eyes in the morning, most of us unconsciously seek out external totems of transformation. Our smartphone. Our first cup of coffee. Showering, shampooing our hair, shaving our legs or faces and changing into our work clothes are all rituals of becoming. At the end of the day, when we wash off our greasepaint and change out of our costumes, we confront who we were all along. On my visits to the United Kingdom, Germany and Scandinavia, I’m always struck by the sheer number of billboards advertising suntan creams and oils intended to darken natives’ complexions. But Indonesia, India, Thailand and Brazil offer almost the same number of billboards marketing creams that promise to whiten complexions. Everyone aspires to be something just a bit different than they actually are.

  As I prepared for my Subtexting on behalf of Tally Weijl, I came up against two roadblocks. First, I was an older male asking questions of adolescent females; and second, there was a language barrier. Almost none of the teenaged girls I interviewed in Switzerland, France, Austria, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Poland and the Ukraine spoke English. But in the end, it didn’t matter, as most of the girls eventually allowed me inside their bedrooms, and bedrooms always convey more information in total silence than most people do using words.

  Whenever I enter the bedroom of any teenager, male or female, I carry a checklist with me. Clothing always comes first. Is it displayed openly, or hidden in the closet? What brands are openly displayed, if any? Are there posters or artwork hanging on the wall? How and where is the bed positioned? How central is the bed? Is there a bedspread, quilt or duvet? How many pillows? Where on the bed do you find wear and tear or evidence of heavy use? How close is the bed to the nearest electrical wall socket? How many hours a day do the owners spend in their bedrooms? In addition to these bedroom details, how many selfies do they shoot on average during a 24-hour period? How much time do they spend on their laptops, versus their tablets, versus their phones? What role do music and videos play in their lives, and from where do they access them mostly?

  Lastly, I study the parallels between a girl’s “home”—her bedroom—and her Facebook “home” page. I like to say that social media is the new bedroom wall. Just as they do inside their own sleeping areas, Facebook users upload artwork and photographs onto their “walls,” “like” certain books, magazines and films, and create photo collages and albums. An open Rolodex of their friends is always available for perusal and, of course, users are regularly urged to update their “statuses,” a word Facebook means literally.

  Social media home pages and offline homes have another critical thing in common: only a small fraction of what we post on social media bears much resemblance to what’s really going on in our lives—and our real homes are often edited constructs of who we believe ourselves to be. To add even more complexity to this question, I knew that even though creating a Facebook page has become a rite of passage for a 13-year-old, a teenager’s more authentic self is more likely to show up on places most parents don’t dare trespass, like Instagram, or across free text-messaging apps like WeChat, Kik and WhatsApp.

  First, though, an adolescent girl’s identity, aspirations and desires can be found in her bedroom, a place where almost nothing is left to chance.

  The bedrooms of adolescents have changed dramatically in only ten years. The centerpiece of any child’s room used to be a desk, a chair and a desktop or laptop computer. Today, it’s the bed itself. In the past few years, beds have literally expanded, as the result of teenaged boys and girls using them as command posts. Sure, some kids still use desks when doing their homework, but for most teenagers and even college students, the bed is where they read, study, doze, slump, text, post, FaceTime, Skype, listen to music and watch videos, usually simultaneously.

  As a result, the concept of light has also changed. All around the world, when we wake up, the first thing most of us reach for is our phone, which has become as much a transitional object as the blankets we carried around with us when we were young. A 2014 survey carried out by YouGov and the Huffington Post revealed that almost two-thirds of smartphone users between the ages of 18 and 29 actually sleep “with their phones or tablets in their beds,”6 implying that our first and final exposure to light during a 24-hour period is the artificial blue light of pixels. The radiance from our phones is almost more potent, and pertinent, than either sunlight or moonlight. A decade ago, there were anywhere from two to five lamps in the average teenaged girl’s bedroom. Today, as patches of screen-light illuminate our bedrooms instead, lamps have become nearly as redundant as desks.

  Along with light, the concept of “display” has also gone through any number of changes. Chairs still exist, but mostly serve as structures on which to drape or hang clothing. Ten years ago, girls’ bedroom walls were papered with any number of posters and artwork. Today, two posters at most hang on the average girl’s wall. In many cases, girls may have long outgrown their interest in the subject of the poster, but when asked why they haven’t taken it down, they invariably give the same answer: they don’t have “time,” or they’re “too busy.” The real reason, it became clear to me later, is that they’re holding on to what remains of their childhoods, an idea I’ll be revisiting later on.

  Boys’ bedrooms have undergone a similar number of changes in the past decade, and whenever rooms have transformed, it’s safe to say their owners have, too. Generally speaking, adolescent males are becoming more like adolescent females, and the reverse is also true. If today’s girls are nerdier, today’s boys are needie
r. Once upon a time, boys would sprawl, the edge of a shoe or a sneaker grazing the chair or couch, but today, boys have taken to curling one ankle around the other. In general they’ve become more fashion-focused, with trendy shoes and sneakers taking on increasing importance in their lives. Hence the omnipresence of the floor-length mirror, which today as many boys as girls are likely to have.

  But what could girls’ bedrooms—in Switzerland, Italy, France, Austria, Germany and Poland—tell me about reversing the fortunes of a Swiss-based fashion retailer? Frankly I was puzzled where to start, and a few weeks later, having conducted Subtext Research across eastern and western Europe, I wasn’t all that much smarter. Apart from the overall changes in décor I’ve just noted, and the prominence of the bed, at that point nothing I saw or heard struck me as terribly unusual, which is why I turned things around and asked each girl I interviewed if she wouldn’t mind keeping a videotaped and text-based diary, and also whether they were willing to take a dozen photographs that best described who they were (or rather, how they saw themselves).

  As far as the videotaped diary was concerned, the rules were simple: The girl was asked to fill out what she did that day, and what she planned to do the next. If she visited a website, she had to write down its name, and the same went for the music she listened to and the videos she watched. At first, the recounting felt cliché and staged—most girls seemed to be reenacting what they saw on shows like Sex and the City and Pretty Little Liars—but as time went on the videos grew looser and more relaxed: I am now going to the fridge. Tonight I am going out to meet my boyfriend. I’m now going onto YouTube to listen to Sia’s new song.

  Based on their photographs alone, I realized that almost all the pictures the girls had shot revealed imbalances. Ironically, these were often “counterbalanced” on the girls’ Facebook pages. The Facebook photo of one girl struggling with her weight showed her profile only, and a gaggle of slender, good-looking friends. The Facebook page of another girl whose parents were divorcing, and who’d confided in me how alone she felt, showed a girl who was literally never by herself. Offline was the real world, it seemed, while dreams lived online. There was another thing, too: Based on their online videos and separate interviews, the lives of adolescent girls revolved around fashion and dressing up. My research revealed that girls spent around 80 percent of their waking hours mulling what they wore that day, what they were thinking about wearing the next day and clothing in general—a somewhat shocking statistic. They were also online anywhere from two to three hours a day visiting their favorite fashion retailers, websites and Tumblr blogs. Swiss girls were preoccupied by British and German fashion websites, as well as Tumblr, Instagram and Snapchat, while eastern European girls tracked Scandinavian websites. Most girls knew the fashion world intimately well, including the names of the top models, and kept an official or unofficial wish list of outfits they wanted to buy but couldn’t afford.

  This same preoccupation with fashion could be seen with their smartphones themselves, beginning with their covers, which were plastered with stickers and decals, and extending to the apps: color-matching apps, apps that matched lipstick hues to clothing, apps that gave the locations of the hottest clubs in town and apps offering techniques to improve a girl’s appearance or make her look slimmer than she was. Not a single girl I met was at peace with how she looked. She either considered herself too plump or too slender, an issue, I might add, that can and should be blamed squarely on the contemporary clothing store. For ease-of-manufacturing reasons, retailers don’t produce a wide range of clothes for a range of body shapes, and rather than blaming manufacturers, girls convince themselves that the fault lies with them.

  Then there were the selfies. A selfie can sometimes tell me more about a person than anything inside a meticulously staged bedroom. When a girl shows another girl a photo on a smartphone, the first few things she seeks out are, in order of importance: Am I in this picture? How do I look? Who is standing beside me? Does the person standing beside me in this photo lend me a halo effect of popularity, or is standing beside this person a social liability? Selfies, it seemed, were even more important than the event or moment they were supposed to memorialize.

  Finally, I put aside an entire week to go shopping with large groups of girls. If there was an H&M near their house or apartment, they would go down there for 45 minutes to an hour, walk around, chat with store employees and ogle the mannequins. They weren’t there to buy anything; they were there to immerse themselves in a fashion fantasy, and maybe touch the hem of their own aspiration—it was as if by shopping at a global chain, they had come that much closer to escaping their own local identities. Still, as the girls trooped through store after store, with me trailing behind them, taking notes, I couldn’t help but notice that along with observing the clothes, they were also busy evaluating the other girls in the store. Subconsciously, it seemed, girls perceived a clothing store less on what it has for sale, and more on the other women who are shopping there. (The same is often true for prospective female students when they visit college and university campuses.) If the other girls aren’t cool or aspirational enough, a girl will take her business elsewhere.

  Inside Tally Weijl and other retailers, I observed another intriguing behavior. Girls rarely, if ever, shopped by themselves. Instead, a small crowd of three, four or five girls would appear in the dressing room area. Two of them would stand sentry as a pair of other girls disappeared inside the dressing room to try on a piece of clothing. When one or both girls came out, they were met with a flurry of approving or disapproving comments and opinions. But was this really all that unusual? (The answer turned out to be yes, but at the time this observation didn’t feel like anything at all.)

  I walked away from my first round of Subtext Research with the distinct impression of how difficult and confusing it must be to be a 14- or 15-year old girl, shy and bold at the same time, dependent on your parents and family, but with your physical development overtaking your chronological age—a confusion that showed up in the teddy bears that kept appearing in bedrooms from Poland to Austria.

  Worn and adorable as they were, these teddy bears weren’t what they seemed. Many of the girls I interviewed told me they had a boyfriend, and when I asked them about their teddy bears, it was clear in most cases that the teddy bear was a stand-in for the boys in their lives. “Describe your teddy bear,” I would say, or “What was the first time you felt really close to your teddy bear?” or “Can you describe a moment when your teddy disappointed you?” These questions weren’t as strange as they sound. When girls discussed the boys in their lives, they seldom described them accurately, as I would later find out when meeting the boys; what I heard instead was how girls wanted their boyfriends to be, and what their idealized image-making said about the girls themselves.

  Teenaged girls inhabited an uncertain area made up of two separate universes: a Toys“R”Us world of the past, and a sexualized future ecosystem symbolized by stores like Victoria’s Secret. Most girls who went into Victoria’s Secret told me they felt out of place, and even uncomfortable. At the same time, still living at home, they no longer felt like children. In contrast to boys, their own physical and psychological development placed them in a gray area with no real name of its own. One snapshot I took summed up this duality perfectly and poignantly: a teddy bear sitting on a blanket embossed with a Playboy bunny in a bedroom belonging to a 15-year-old girl.

  As well as being preoccupied with how they looked, girls were also hyperconscious of how their friends, and the world itself, perceived them. Being a teenaged girl meant that you were petrified of standing alone, or being left out, forgotten or rejected. Today, everyone knows what a girl does when she is feeling insecure about herself: she posts a new photo of herself on Facebook and awaits a flurry of compliments about her appearance. Once she’s regained a dose of self-confidence, she is ready to become, once again, the star of her own life.

  In
my work across Brazil on behalf of a beer manufacturer (which I covered in chapter 5), I couldn’t help noticing that the bedrooms of every Brazilian girl featured a display, or collection, of some kind, usually of colorful beer bottles. (Beer drinking is extremely common among Brazilian adolescents.) These collections communicated a message about who a girl wanted to be, or alternately, about the people, or socioeconomic class, with whom she wanted most to be associated. In some cases, the girl in question didn’t even like the beer brand she had on display—such as Heineken—but that didn’t matter. Heineken cost more than the average beer brand, and Brazilian girls would save up for weeks to afford a night out at a popular club. It was as if by surrounding herself with Heineken bottles during the week, she could somehow move closer to the sort of person she imagined herself being, as well as to the friends she hoped someday to attract.

  There was no analogy to those beer cans in the bedrooms I visited in eastern and western Europe. Sure, an Austrian girl might have on display a set of matching pillows, a Polish girl a tray of perfumes, but nothing close to what I had seen in Brazil. Still, knowing that fashion is always linked to aspiration and transformation, I knew I needed to discover where girls kept their “secret display,” in the hopes it could help Tally Weijl better understand its consumers. I finally found what I was looking for in an expected place: on girls’ feet. Whenever I opened the door to a closet packed with clothing and shoes, I knew I’d discovered the equivalent of a “beer shelf.” What’s more, girls told me that every single pair of shoes had a purpose, a concrete reason for being. Any girl who owns and wears shoes knows that footwear is a reflection of her mood and attitude, and that shoes, like music, can both reflect and dictate the way someone feels. Based on the Subtexting I carried out, the average teenaged Swiss girl owned 19 pairs of shoes, compared to 15 for a French girl and 13 for a German girl.