Dear Liz Lovero,

Yours,
Peter Piper

Dear Peter,

I hear you — changing economic fortunes definitely yield some awkwardness. These days it seems that just about everyone is sliding down the financial ladder. Kudos to the friend that can do better in lean times, though. Is he a bankruptcy lawyer or a repo man?

I’d like to break your letter down into two questions. The first, a basic issue of interpersonal relationships: what do you do when a friend changes and/or takes on a new bothersome habit? The other is a little broader: what does it mean when a friend’s attitude toward class and money change? Also, perhaps more significantly, your question makes the very strong presupposition that cool is a necessary condition for friendship and that to be cool one needs to strongly reject consumer/materialist culture. Or at least dress like you do.

First, what to do when a friend changes? You have three options: accept it, confront them on it/make fun of them for it (those are really the same thing), or stop being their friend. The first two are the domain of some other, nicer columnist. I would like to make a defense of the latter. Yours truly is not an enemy of long friendship and dedication to maintaining those relationships. In fact, I count among my closest friends a woman I’ve known since 1st grade. I do, however, firmly believe that some friendships are really only intended to last for a shorter period of time and that this is totally okay. Why? As the Cocteau Twins once said more poetically than I could, “the devil wants steady but we wax and wane.” There is no constant self, sometimes you grow apart from people, and ending a platonic friendship is much more awkward than ending a romantic relationship. There is no clear end marker, like no longer copulating with the person. No need to start a big fight about it. Save yourself the drama. If you find that Mr. Nice Sweaters is just way too annoying, that you have become far too different as people, and you don’t see yourselves getting any closer anytime soon, maybe its time to let him go.

Onto the second question…what to do when a friend changes class or attitude toward money. As anyone who has suffered through an Edith Warton novel can attest*, manners and fashion are not simply courteous behavior and personal expression but an indication of an individual’s place in the hierarchy of social order. In other words, cool is not simply a matter of style but a manifestation of a kind of social/cultural wealth. While we the meritocracy-loving if-Barack-can-do-it-I-can-be-President Americans like to consider manners and fashion a manifestation of a self-constructed social identity, Walter Benn Michaels, in this month’s BookForum, brilliantly counters this notion.

So what does it mean if wealth is a measure not only of monetary capital (physical assets, property, cash money money) but also a measure of social and cultural capital (cool friends and cool ideas)? I, like most of my friends, find myself in a line of employment and a position in the hierarchy of contemporary New York wherein I am rich in cultural and social capital but fairly poor in monetary capital. In my day job, (come on you honestly didn’t think I could live off advice columns) I work as a contemporary art curator so my access to cultural dialogue and art in general is pretty substantial. Since artists like to hang out with other creative people, and companies want to be associated with creative types, and rich people like to feel cool and smart, working in the visual arts gets you invited to lots of dinners and parties where you can get drunk for free. The catch: my remuneration is pretty minimal. To give you an idea, while things have definitely picked up a great deal since then, my first curatorial job, in 2004, paid $21,500 a year.

Nevertheless, I am highly aware that my “cool” life is a result of my capacity to eschew moneymaking for several years. Most jobs with a high social and cultural cache require you pay your dues for a while as an unpaid intern and then a barely paid assistant before gaining any real income or stability. While I hardly came from wealth, I didn’t have to pay for college, I wasn’t supporting a family or an elderly parent, I had health insurance, and if something were to go terribly wrong I knew I could always ask my family for monetary help. (And let’s be honest, I definitely hit them up for occasional help in less-than-dire situations. Thanks Judy and Jeff! ) In other words, I can wear what I want and not worry about getting a stable, professional, nice-sweater-wearing job because I am privileged.

While I don’t pretend to know the class background of yourself or your friend, it has been my own experience that people turn to talk of money when they need it and when it has become increasingly important to them. Does your friend have the privilege to avoid moneymaking and the uniform that it often necessitates? It seems as though he has not always thought Brooks Brothers was the epitome of style. All this sweater wearing and financial conversation is quite possibly your friend trying to make himself feel better about the fact that he can no longer ascribe to the same ideas of cool. I guess what I am trying to say, Peter, is maybe your friend has chosen to be bougie and thus uncool because he has to. And frankly, there is nothing less cool then judging your friends because they don’t have as much money as you do. So maybe you just need to chill out and stop being all judge-y or, if you can’t get over it and he’s too annoying, then just stop being his friend.

Xo
Liz Lovero

* Seriously Ethan Frome is the worst novel of all time. They try to commit suicide on a SLED and they are so lame that they cannot even do it — morons!

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