Insufficiently-critical shopper

Oh happy day, Princeton now has an Urban Outfitters.

A sentence like this needs context: until the arrival of said Outfitters, if you wanted low-end, there was, what, J. Crew? Which, especially these days... kind of mid-to-high-end. New additions in town include a deck-shoe store and a Brooks Brothers, but there's also Ralph Lauren, J. McLaughlin, Kate Spade, I think a Lilly Pulitzer. Oh, and the Princeton-sweatpants store. What am I forgetting? The lacrosse shop. In other words, although I'm not averse to clothes-shopping, I had managed to live here, what, a year and a half, most of it time without many trips into the city or a car, without buying any clothing whatsoever in town.*

Say what you will about Urban Outfitters - that it's vintage-knock-off, poor-quality, overpriced junk aimed at those too square for real vintage-shopping; that it's mall-clothing for 12-year-olds; that it's a subliminal plot to turn young people into Republicans; or that it's generally obnoxious. Say it - you're not telling me anything I don't know. But when it comes to town, I'm not what would be called a "critical shopper." There is now a store I could walk (OK, bike) to that sells normal clothing. $40 jeans. $15 (U.S. union-made, apparently) hats. Actually, really gorgeous $15 hats (we will look past the fact that a similar hat is cheaper in Japan, even though I think they're made in Pennsylvania or possibly even New Jersey - Princeton is Princeton, and if a hamburger's $14...). I broke my no-garments-purchased-in-town policy to buy the absolute perfect gray hat, one I can't find a photo of online, but that's basically the acrylic version of this. It's just so cool, so Acne, so A.P.C., so Gwyneth-on-a-good-day, this thing that I bought in Princeton.

*While I've come to accept online shopping as a fact-of-living-in-the-woods, online clothes-shopping, not so much. Meanwhile, to give town its due, there is also a consignment store where the less-exciting Talbots goes to be subtly reduced, as well as an out-of-the-way, barely-counts-as-in-town, has-some-potential thrift shop where they make you check your bag, which, if you want this to be a dissertation-break, means you end up holding your computer as you browse, which is not necessarily worth it.