Are you guilty of buying things to make yourself look better?

You know how you think the world has gone mad and then you realise that what seemed beyond insane has become normal? Paying money for bottled still water for example. Giving babies computer tablets. Well it’s happened again. Or rather, what was already happening has reached peak absurd.

I refer, of course, to emperor’ s new clothes shopping. Actually it’s one worse than that; that would be ripped and frayed second hand jeans, reconstituted, and sold on for £200/$256 (and that’s already happening, they’re called Re/done). This phenomenon is more like “virtue shopping”: buying things in the hope that you will look like the earthy, handy, genuine sort of person who isn’t interested in fleeting trends, and who doesn’t really buy things.

For example sticks. Not logs, not firewood, but good looking, large twigs. These specially selected sticks you can now buy, for £18, in a gift shop near you (certainly if you live in Stoke Newington, once the poorest corner of east London, now colonized by rich hipsters who gravitated there in search of edge and authenticity). There is a new shop in Stoke Newington selling sticks because of course there is. pic.twitter.com/ SbX6vh7ZxX — Debora Robertson (@lickedspoon) March 23, 2017

We know about the sticks because they made the news. Some people were amazed that sticks featuring a hole so you can nail them to the wall (and use them as a hook, or a lone twig decoration), were retailing for the price of a birch tree from the garden centre. But these people have evidently not been paying attention to virtue shopping trends, eg. empty jam jars on sale in Waitrose for more than a jar full of jam (presumably to be used as vases? Glasses?). Next week we’ll find out that M&S are selling “dippy ash” so you can pop a bit on the end of your nose and look like you’ve been tending your log fire, even though your house is under floor heated.

The stick and the jar are part of the same virtue shopping syndrome. Both items appeal to the sort of person who probably doesn’t eat jam (they don’t eat bread, or sugar), or walk in the woods, but who likes the homey, authentic aura of a jam jar and a stick.

To virtue shop you must have a) sufficient money to be looking around for things to buy you couldn’t possibly need b) subliminal nostalgia for meaning and purpose but c) not enough common sense to know that virtue shopping is the worst sort of pointless shopping. At least buying another mini designer bag is what it is — greedy. But buying a denim apron with leather straps because you think it makes you look like an eco-aware humanitarian who might make their own cheese? That’s tragic.

It’s not just Them mind you. Back in the early Nineties, when Ca th Kidston was still one barely known shop, I remember toying with buying some quite pricey painted clothes pegs. I lived in a flat, I didn’t have a washing line, but the pegs stirred fantasies of cottagey domesticity.

As we now know, Cath was onto something pretty big. She recognized that you don’t have to own a garden with a pond to be irresistibly attracted to a distressed trug, a net for minnows, a hurricane lamp or a picnic rug. In fact, if you aren’t that person you’re more likely to want to buy into it, to hint at depths or history you haven’t got at all. That was the beginning of fake life propping.

Virtue shopping does feel like it’s getting madder, but only because more people are mugs and their aspirations are all to do with rawness and Scandinavian simplicity. Now we’re living in a bizarre period where people treat sticks as art, and jam jars as vases, and flower pots as table decorations and there are shops where all they sell are bags of pebbles and reclaimed school desks. And if you’re rich, your jeans are made out of salvaged jeans that once belonged to people who actually lived a life in them.