Scanner Sunday – Catalogs, Part 1

My household is on the mailing lists for what strikes me as a precipitously large number of catalogs. In fact I’m not altogether convinced as to which collection is (or hypothetically would be) larger – my 2K volume comic book library, or the number of catalogs which pass through this house in a given year. Since we tend not to save the catalogs for very long, there’s no side-by-side comparison data available.

The situation has actually escalated since we moved back in December, because the former residents did not do a very good job of setting up their forwarding address, and we still get tons of junk mail in their name. And they were an older couple with eclectic tastes – he had an English-style pub in the basement, she had a teapot collection and various other caches of knickknacks upstairs – so clearly they were prime catalog targets. To be fair, my wife and I do a good amount of consumer-profile-expanding online shopping ourselves, which apparently even in the year 2010 still translates to getting glossy dead-tree catalogs dumped in one’s mailbox forever thereafter. A good bit of our shopping is under the guise of gift-giving, and sometimes for people who have different tastes than we do. (Not judging, just saying.) Or very occasionally someone in this house (hint: usually not me) will have a very specific idea of a very particular thing they want and via the magic of the unbiased logarithms of the Google one will stumble upon an online retailer that happens to sell that one particular thing which has a miniscule Venn overlap with a whole lot of weird random crap. The point is, we don’t just get a lot of catalogs from whitebread retailers like Babies R Us and Land’s End (though we do get those) but we also get a ton of freaky stuff.

So to kick off Scanner Sundays here I’m going to focus on one catalog in particular that shows up in our mailbox regularly, which is the eponymous vehicle for a company that calls itself The Pyramid Collection. The subtitle of this catalog is “Myth, Magick, Fantasy & Romance” and it is fairly stunning. In brutally boiled-down terms I would hazard a guess that the target demographics for this retailer include Twi-Moms, and Ren Faire patrons, and ideally Twi-Moms who love Ren Faires. And if you didn’t understand that last sentence I gotta admit, I kind of envy you a little bit.

Because make no mistake, this is a sub-culture which rubs up against many of the sub-cultures with which I identify myself. I have been to Ren Faires and had a good time, even though I don’t exactly countdown to Ren Faire season as it were, and never would have listed one as a potential dream job. (The Ren is for Renaissance, these are the pseudo-medieval re-enactment dealies they set up in a big field where people man booths and run entertainments that basically simulate a historical context that never really existed on Earth at any point except within the pages of Tolkien-esque fairy tales.) And I play Dungeons & Dragons, although I’ve never felt the all-consuming desire to own in real life the kind of black velvet cloak my highwayman character in the game might wear, although then again I have played alongside people who have both felt and yielded to that very desire. So, I get it. I get that some people’s favorite day is Halloween and some people wish every day could be Halloween and some people just go ahead and dress and act as if it were. I get the inherent appeal of a world enlivened by “magick-with-a-superfluous-K” and I tend to experience that in an inward-directed way by consuming Jim Butcher novels or Ralph Bakshi movies or whathaveyou, whereas other people only branch away from my mindset by experiencing fantasy in a more outward-directed way, as self-expression, by wearing dragon jewelry every day and putting vampire-themed magnetic fish on their back bumper. In mental space, these people are my next door neighbors. And I meant what I said on Friday, I’m not here to mock them for shopping at the off-brand adult Hot Topic and wearing black gowns with silkscreened rainbow mermaids to the grocery store. I would, however, like to make fun of The Pyramid Collection itself because I do seriously wonder sometimes what they are thinking. Let’s go to the scan:


(Click to embiggen – you know you want to!)

Now … again … I’ve owned some denim shirts. I had plenty when they were briefly in fashion, and a good while thereafter, and I may very well get some again. They are practical, to my mind, because denim is dang near indestructible and also coordinates with everything. And as I just finished saying, I do reasonably grok the idea of conflating personal style with playing dress-up in order to make the mundane world a more magickal place. But … so … Denim Princess? Really? To whom exactly is this being marketed? To my knowledge there is currently no entertainment franchise where staggeringly dull girls are romantically dueled over by toothless bad boys in the alternate-history royal courts of the Wild West (and believe me, if said franchise did exist, I would know about it). So presumably it’s just some bizarre hybrid somebody dreamed up from scratch, not realizing that the commonness of denim kind of cancels out the idealized fantasy of ruffles and lace. It’s like, if you're going to insist that everyone at work call you "Morrigan" that's cool, but go all the way with it. None of this “Hey, I’m a free-spirited woman-child and firm believer in whimsy, but when we go to lunch today at Chili’s I don’t want my clothes to get ruined if Bob spills queso on my sleeve again.”

And I think the Ren-Faire-going Twi-Moms would get this too, which means The Pyramid Collection really has no one to sell this item to, and somewhere there's a warehouse with five thousand denim princess jackets waiting to be bought for wardrobing extras in a widescreen steampunk chivalry epic. I really need to get on that idea.