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You’re dressed up 1)to the nines, you’re standing in an impossibly glamorous room, your hands are sweating in anticipation and the excitement is almost unbearable. But you’re not waiting to meet the Queen. You’re simply spending a week’s wages on a designer jacket you can’t afford and don’t really need.
If this sounds remotely familiar, the likelihood is you’re a brand addict.
How exactly does one become obsessed with brands? As a reformed addict myself, I am, unfortunately, an expert on the subject. I suffer from a recurring 2)compulsion towards the labels on consumer goods. If you and I met in the street, I would automatically scan the logos on you and, based on their status, judge the type of person that you were.
If you and I had met last year, you would have spotted the 3)ostentatious logos that I 4)sported—it was paramount that my brands conveyed the right message about who I was to anyone who cared to look. With my limited-edition 5)trainers, luxury brand wallet and top-of-the-range Mac computer, the message of who I thought I was 6)spelled out: progressive, creative and cool. But, in fact, it increasingly said: desperate, miserable and poor. Without these 7)props, I would have been lost. I was fiercely loyal to a small number of brands—Adidas and Apple in particular—to the point that I could not contemplate buying products made by their rivals. My spare time was devoted to tracking down new branded goods. I once travelled to New York simply to buy a pair of Prada shoes that had sold out in the UK.
Obsessive shopping is traditionally associated with women, but a rise in the importance of male grooming has dragged men into the shops. I felt incredible pressure to conform to the advertised ideals of the “new man”.
Consumer debt in the UK has reached an 8)all time high of £1 trillion. Meanwhile, advertising spending recently passed the £19 billion mark. With the average person being exposed to 3,000 adverts a day, it is no coincidence that 80 percent of Britons admit to regularly overspending.
More than a million people in the UK suffer from compulsive shopping disorder, often a symptom of the low self-esteem that I was later diagnosed with. My own addiction to labels led to an increasingly expensive lifestyle. At the age of 19, I plunged into debt within months of landing my first job as a TV production assistant. By 30, I owed a total of £19,000. The 9)crashing highs and lows of spending made me feel increasingly anxious and depressed, but I carried on shopping to cheer myself up—a classic love/hate cycle of addiction.
The anxiety reached a climax in 2006 when I caught myself inventing excuses to escape the office and go shopping. By this time, I was fully immersed in brand culture as editor of a lifestyle and fashion magazine, a world in which it is particularly important to play the game. I checked myself into therapy aged 31.
During my sessions, I recalled being initially unpopular at school because I didn’t wear the right trainers or carry the right sports bag. I pleaded with my parents to buy me these things so that I could become part of the cool set. They refused on grounds of cost, but this served only to make the brands more enviable to me.
During therapy, I came to realise that this 10)tug of war sparked my lifelong habit of obtaining brands. At all costs, I concluded that to break with the past, I had to destroy my previously branded life in the most violent way I knew how.
The first symbolic act was to burn my favourite pair of trainers, given to me at my first meeting with the brand managers at Adidas. The level of anxious heartache that I felt, taking a match to them, was 11)excruciating, but it only served to remind me how deep the obsession had become. After all, it was only a pair of shoes. The main event followed six months later, with a public 12)bonfire in Central London. Twenty years of designer shopping went up in smoke before an audience that was largely unsympathetic to my cause. Thousands of people posted negative comments on websites, appalled by the casual destruction of valuable goods.
Post-bonfire, I suffered a terrible 13)gnawing emptiness. It took six months for me to recover from the loss, helped enormously by my therapist. Self-confidence, she told me, came from accepting the person that I really was, not covering up with a blanket of brands.
Being a child of the 1970s, I was, from birth, bombarded by TV advertising and 14)billboards. A new study out suggests that continual exposure to brand messages has a very real psychological impact. Buyers do not only consume the actual goods advertised but also their symbolic meanings—successful, happy, attractive, glamorous, thus moving closer to the ideal identity portrayed by media models.
Having 15)de-branded so publicly myself,
every aspect of my life has been transformed, sometimes for the worse. I don’t get much work as a fashion journalist any more, and the invites to parties, along with promotional gifts, have dried up. More importantly, I face a new set of challenges with my newborn baby boy Dexter. Before long, he’ll be asking me for branded football boots, mobile phones and computer games. Will I give in to pester-power, or will I deny him the brands that his mates take for granted?
Right now, I honestly cannot be sure.
1) to the nines 完美
穿着讲究的你，站在一个极其耀眼的房间里，思忖着，手心直冒汗，激动的心情几乎难以抑制。你可不是等着觐见女王，只不过是要花尽一周的薪水买一件名师设计的夹克，而这件夹克你根本买不起也并不十分需要。
如果这样的情形听来似曾相识，那你有可能是一个品牌的拥趸了。
人们究竟是怎样陷入对品牌的迷恋的呢？作为一个改过自新的过来人，很不幸，我可是这方面的专家。我苦于一次又一次抑制不住对产品上的商标的冲动。如果你我在街上相遇，我就会不由自主地扫视你身上的牌子，根据它们的档次判断你是个什么类型的人。
如果你去年遇见我，你会注意到我身上那些故意亮出来的惹人注目的商标——我所拥有的品牌应向任何有兴趣注意我的人传递正确的信息以表现出我是怎样的一个人，这一点极为重要。我那限量版的运动鞋、昂贵的名牌钱包、最新款的苹果电脑，我曾认为它们很清楚地为我传递出一个进取、有创意又酷的形象。但事实上，这个形象却愈发表现出：这是个绝望、不幸又可怜的人。失去了这些行头，我就会感到迷失。我曾忠心拥戴一小部分品牌——特别是阿迪达斯和苹果——到了根本不会考虑买它们竞争对手产品的地步。我的空余时间都用来搜寻新的品牌产品。有一次，我专门跑到纽约只是为了买普拉达的一款鞋子，因为这款鞋在英国已经卖断了货。
传统认为只有女人才会痴迷于购物，但随着男性容装变得越来越重要，男人也被拽入其中。为了接近广告塑造的完美“新男人”形象，我曾经深感压力巨大。
在英国，消费者债务已经达到历史上最高水平——一万亿英镑。同时，广告费用也在最近突破190亿英镑大关。平均每人每天要受到3000个广告的狂轰乱炸，无怪乎80%的英国人承认自己习惯性地过度消费。
英国有超过100万人患有强迫性购物症，这常常是自信心不足的症状，正如后来专家给我的诊断结论一样。对品牌沉迷成瘾让我的生活开支越来越大。19岁那年，我获得了第一份工作，成为一名电视制作助理，此后的短短几个月我就陷入负债的漩涡。到了30岁，我的债务已经达到19000英镑。极度不规律的支出让我越来越焦虑，越来越沮丧，但我继续购物，让自己高兴起来——这可谓是沉迷者的典型的爱恨循环。
到了2006年，当我发现自己编造借口不去上班而跑去购物的时候，这种焦虑达到了顶峰状态。那时，作为时尚生活杂志编辑的我，已经完全沉浸在品牌文化中，而这种浸淫在这一行恰恰很重要。31岁的时候，我去求诊治疗了。
治疗期间，我回想起自己在学校一开始不受欢迎，是因为我穿了不时尚的运动鞋，背了不入流的运动包。于是我恳求父母给我买那些时髦的物品，这样我就可以成为新潮入时群体中的一员。父母以花费为由太大拒绝了我的请求，但这却使我更加渴求那些品牌产品。
在治疗期间，我开始意识到是这种心理拉锯战引发了那伴我一生的追求品牌的习惯。我决定要不惜一切地与过去诀别，我必须用我所能想到的最暴力的方式，与我过去沉溺于品牌的生活决裂。
第一个象征性的行动就是烧掉我那双心爱的运动鞋，那双鞋是我第一次和阿迪达斯的品牌经理们见面时获赠的。把它付诸一炬时，我焦虑和心痛的程度无以复加，但这只会提醒我自己是多么地沉溺其中。毕竟，那只是一双鞋。6个月以后，在伦敦中部的一个公共篝火会上，发生了一件大事。在众人面前，我20年来购买的名牌产品灰飞烟灭，但绝大多数人并不理解我的举动。成千上万的人在网上发帖批评我，在他们看来，我随心所欲地毁坏了贵重的商品，行为令人惊骇。
篝火会后，极度的空虚不断侵蚀着我。在治疗专家的大力帮助下，我花了6个月才从失落中恢复过来。治疗专家告诉我说，自信源于对自我的认同，而不是用品牌的包装将自我掩盖。
生于20世纪70年代的我，从一出生就遭受电视广告和大型户外广告的轰炸。一项新的研究显示，持续暴露于品牌讯息当中，人的心理确实会受到影响。购买者不仅仅消费广告中的产品，而且也吸收它们的象征意义——成功、幸福、迷人、有魅力，从而更趋近于媒体中模特呈现出的完美形象。
如此公开地“摘牌”后，我生活的各个方面也都因此而改变，有些方面是变糟了。作为时尚记者，我失去了大部分的采访机会，也不再有人邀请我参加附赠促销礼品的派对了。更重要的是，因为我新出生的儿子德克斯特，我面临着一系列新的挑战。不久以后，他就会请求我给他买名牌足球鞋、手机和电脑游戏。我是耐不住孩子的吵闹纠缠而照办呢，还是拒绝给他买那些他的伙伴们认为理应拥有的名牌产品？
现在，说实在的，我真的不确定。
If this sounds remotely familiar, the likelihood is you’re a brand addict.
How exactly does one become obsessed with brands? As a reformed addict myself, I am, unfortunately, an expert on the subject. I suffer from a recurring 2)compulsion towards the labels on consumer goods. If you and I met in the street, I would automatically scan the logos on you and, based on their status, judge the type of person that you were.
If you and I had met last year, you would have spotted the 3)ostentatious logos that I 4)sported—it was paramount that my brands conveyed the right message about who I was to anyone who cared to look. With my limited-edition 5)trainers, luxury brand wallet and top-of-the-range Mac computer, the message of who I thought I was 6)spelled out: progressive, creative and cool. But, in fact, it increasingly said: desperate, miserable and poor. Without these 7)props, I would have been lost. I was fiercely loyal to a small number of brands—Adidas and Apple in particular—to the point that I could not contemplate buying products made by their rivals. My spare time was devoted to tracking down new branded goods. I once travelled to New York simply to buy a pair of Prada shoes that had sold out in the UK.
Obsessive shopping is traditionally associated with women, but a rise in the importance of male grooming has dragged men into the shops. I felt incredible pressure to conform to the advertised ideals of the “new man”.
Consumer debt in the UK has reached an 8)all time high of £1 trillion. Meanwhile, advertising spending recently passed the £19 billion mark. With the average person being exposed to 3,000 adverts a day, it is no coincidence that 80 percent of Britons admit to regularly overspending.
More than a million people in the UK suffer from compulsive shopping disorder, often a symptom of the low self-esteem that I was later diagnosed with. My own addiction to labels led to an increasingly expensive lifestyle. At the age of 19, I plunged into debt within months of landing my first job as a TV production assistant. By 30, I owed a total of £19,000. The 9)crashing highs and lows of spending made me feel increasingly anxious and depressed, but I carried on shopping to cheer myself up—a classic love/hate cycle of addiction.
The anxiety reached a climax in 2006 when I caught myself inventing excuses to escape the office and go shopping. By this time, I was fully immersed in brand culture as editor of a lifestyle and fashion magazine, a world in which it is particularly important to play the game. I checked myself into therapy aged 31.
During my sessions, I recalled being initially unpopular at school because I didn’t wear the right trainers or carry the right sports bag. I pleaded with my parents to buy me these things so that I could become part of the cool set. They refused on grounds of cost, but this served only to make the brands more enviable to me.
During therapy, I came to realise that this 10)tug of war sparked my lifelong habit of obtaining brands. At all costs, I concluded that to break with the past, I had to destroy my previously branded life in the most violent way I knew how.
The first symbolic act was to burn my favourite pair of trainers, given to me at my first meeting with the brand managers at Adidas. The level of anxious heartache that I felt, taking a match to them, was 11)excruciating, but it only served to remind me how deep the obsession had become. After all, it was only a pair of shoes. The main event followed six months later, with a public 12)bonfire in Central London. Twenty years of designer shopping went up in smoke before an audience that was largely unsympathetic to my cause. Thousands of people posted negative comments on websites, appalled by the casual destruction of valuable goods.
Post-bonfire, I suffered a terrible 13)gnawing emptiness. It took six months for me to recover from the loss, helped enormously by my therapist. Self-confidence, she told me, came from accepting the person that I really was, not covering up with a blanket of brands.
Being a child of the 1970s, I was, from birth, bombarded by TV advertising and 14)billboards. A new study out suggests that continual exposure to brand messages has a very real psychological impact. Buyers do not only consume the actual goods advertised but also their symbolic meanings—successful, happy, attractive, glamorous, thus moving closer to the ideal identity portrayed by media models.
Having 15)de-branded so publicly myself,
every aspect of my life has been transformed, sometimes for the worse. I don’t get much work as a fashion journalist any more, and the invites to parties, along with promotional gifts, have dried up. More importantly, I face a new set of challenges with my newborn baby boy Dexter. Before long, he’ll be asking me for branded football boots, mobile phones and computer games. Will I give in to pester-power, or will I deny him the brands that his mates take for granted?
Right now, I honestly cannot be sure.
1) to the nines 完美
穿着讲究的你，站在一个极其耀眼的房间里，思忖着，手心直冒汗，激动的心情几乎难以抑制。你可不是等着觐见女王，只不过是要花尽一周的薪水买一件名师设计的夹克，而这件夹克你根本买不起也并不十分需要。
如果这样的情形听来似曾相识，那你有可能是一个品牌的拥趸了。
人们究竟是怎样陷入对品牌的迷恋的呢？作为一个改过自新的过来人，很不幸，我可是这方面的专家。我苦于一次又一次抑制不住对产品上的商标的冲动。如果你我在街上相遇，我就会不由自主地扫视你身上的牌子，根据它们的档次判断你是个什么类型的人。
如果你去年遇见我，你会注意到我身上那些故意亮出来的惹人注目的商标——我所拥有的品牌应向任何有兴趣注意我的人传递正确的信息以表现出我是怎样的一个人，这一点极为重要。我那限量版的运动鞋、昂贵的名牌钱包、最新款的苹果电脑，我曾认为它们很清楚地为我传递出一个进取、有创意又酷的形象。但事实上，这个形象却愈发表现出：这是个绝望、不幸又可怜的人。失去了这些行头，我就会感到迷失。我曾忠心拥戴一小部分品牌——特别是阿迪达斯和苹果——到了根本不会考虑买它们竞争对手产品的地步。我的空余时间都用来搜寻新的品牌产品。有一次，我专门跑到纽约只是为了买普拉达的一款鞋子，因为这款鞋在英国已经卖断了货。
传统认为只有女人才会痴迷于购物，但随着男性容装变得越来越重要，男人也被拽入其中。为了接近广告塑造的完美“新男人”形象，我曾经深感压力巨大。
在英国，消费者债务已经达到历史上最高水平——一万亿英镑。同时，广告费用也在最近突破190亿英镑大关。平均每人每天要受到3000个广告的狂轰乱炸，无怪乎80%的英国人承认自己习惯性地过度消费。
英国有超过100万人患有强迫性购物症，这常常是自信心不足的症状，正如后来专家给我的诊断结论一样。对品牌沉迷成瘾让我的生活开支越来越大。19岁那年，我获得了第一份工作，成为一名电视制作助理，此后的短短几个月我就陷入负债的漩涡。到了30岁，我的债务已经达到19000英镑。极度不规律的支出让我越来越焦虑，越来越沮丧，但我继续购物，让自己高兴起来——这可谓是沉迷者的典型的爱恨循环。
到了2006年，当我发现自己编造借口不去上班而跑去购物的时候，这种焦虑达到了顶峰状态。那时，作为时尚生活杂志编辑的我，已经完全沉浸在品牌文化中，而这种浸淫在这一行恰恰很重要。31岁的时候，我去求诊治疗了。
治疗期间，我回想起自己在学校一开始不受欢迎，是因为我穿了不时尚的运动鞋，背了不入流的运动包。于是我恳求父母给我买那些时髦的物品，这样我就可以成为新潮入时群体中的一员。父母以花费为由太大拒绝了我的请求，但这却使我更加渴求那些品牌产品。
在治疗期间，我开始意识到是这种心理拉锯战引发了那伴我一生的追求品牌的习惯。我决定要不惜一切地与过去诀别，我必须用我所能想到的最暴力的方式，与我过去沉溺于品牌的生活决裂。
第一个象征性的行动就是烧掉我那双心爱的运动鞋，那双鞋是我第一次和阿迪达斯的品牌经理们见面时获赠的。把它付诸一炬时，我焦虑和心痛的程度无以复加，但这只会提醒我自己是多么地沉溺其中。毕竟，那只是一双鞋。6个月以后，在伦敦中部的一个公共篝火会上，发生了一件大事。在众人面前，我20年来购买的名牌产品灰飞烟灭，但绝大多数人并不理解我的举动。成千上万的人在网上发帖批评我，在他们看来，我随心所欲地毁坏了贵重的商品，行为令人惊骇。
篝火会后，极度的空虚不断侵蚀着我。在治疗专家的大力帮助下，我花了6个月才从失落中恢复过来。治疗专家告诉我说，自信源于对自我的认同，而不是用品牌的包装将自我掩盖。
生于20世纪70年代的我，从一出生就遭受电视广告和大型户外广告的轰炸。一项新的研究显示，持续暴露于品牌讯息当中，人的心理确实会受到影响。购买者不仅仅消费广告中的产品，而且也吸收它们的象征意义——成功、幸福、迷人、有魅力，从而更趋近于媒体中模特呈现出的完美形象。
如此公开地“摘牌”后，我生活的各个方面也都因此而改变，有些方面是变糟了。作为时尚记者，我失去了大部分的采访机会，也不再有人邀请我参加附赠促销礼品的派对了。更重要的是，因为我新出生的儿子德克斯特，我面临着一系列新的挑战。不久以后，他就会请求我给他买名牌足球鞋、手机和电脑游戏。我是耐不住孩子的吵闹纠缠而照办呢，还是拒绝给他买那些他的伙伴们认为理应拥有的名牌产品？
现在，说实在的，我真的不确定。