Excess Disguised as Less

In a wasteful age, faux simplicity masks our overindulgence

by Akiko Busch

Not long ago, I was in a newly renovated kitchen in a New York City apartment. The designer had done everything in his power to respect the economy of space, with a flip-top counter and diminutive appliances, but it was the cabinetry that most piqued my interest. To minimize surface clutter, everything was sheathed in lacquered white fiberboard. Even the refrigerator and dishwasher were behind flat cabinet doors.

This clean aesthetic was, in fact, a blatant subversion of the very idea of minimalism—a study in extravagance disguised as pure economy. Twice the amount of surfacing material had been used on the appliances than was needed, and twice the amount of effort would be required to open them every time they were used.

I might have relegated this encounter to the archives of curious design decisions, except that it seemed to say something about the strange place minimalism has found for itself in our culture: Often, now, it is used as a kind of mask for an underlying excess and extravagance.

Few of us will deny that this is a time of consumer excess and that the cycle of bloated consumption and grievous waste is part of our national profile. But as individuals, we are unwilling to cop to our own participation in it. The health of our economy might depend upon our constant consumption of goods, but it's not an identity we much like. It implicates us in something—not exactly a conspiracy, but at least a kind of collusion between voracious consumer appetite and the marketers who depend upon it. As the writer and conservationist Wendell Berry describes the situation: "It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom—a symbiosis of unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom—and all of us are involved in it."

Still, most of us prefer to think of ourselves as wanting and needing only the essentials. It's the divided self of American identity. This is only a guess, but I'd bet that the millions of Americans who carry monthly credit card debt like to think of themselves as self-reliant, able, and sensible, rather than extravagant, imprudent, and impractical. And often, even when we do admit to our excesses, we are quickly corrected. "I'm a drunk when it comes to clothes," said socialite Nan Kempner, but the public was more inclined to view her as an icon of elegance, a maestra of the organized closet. The title given to the show of her wardrobe at the Metropolitan Museum of Art [in New York] was "American Chic." She might have considered herself a drunk, but to others, owning 12 lemon-yellow cashmere sweaters is the epitome of high style.

So as substance abusers in the most literal sense, we seem to do what most other addicts do when faced with the obvious: We go into denial. We spin. Often, that spin involves redefining excess as less. And for all the dangers implicit in the cycle of consumption and waste, I would venture to say that the cycle of indulgence and denial is even more dangerous, because it involves a level of self-deception, along with convoluted arguments of justification that allow us to do whatever we want. Take the VivaTerra catalog, which comes from an eco-friendly retailer that donates a dollar per $75 order to the Trust for Public Land. But the friend of mine who gets its catalog has received two in the past month, and wouldn't it make more sense anyway, she asks, to donate her $225 to the Trust rather than spend that amount on a handbag made from candy wrappers "headed for landfill"?

Ambivalence toward abundance and reinventing excess as less happens at every level of the consumer chain. It's not just candy-wrapper handbags or minimalist kitchens—consider shoppers who go to warehouse outlets such as BJ's, Sam's Club, and Costco, where low prices entice shoppers to buy items sold in bulk, often 3 or 7 or 12 of something when they really require only one. But rather than view their jumbo purchases of shampoo in gallon jugs and shrink-wrapped eight-packs of T-shirts as excessive buying, they define such super-sized purchases as thrifty.