Bryn Mawr, Pa., is one of those grand American towns that double as showrooms for grand American dreams. Teeming with tennis courts, specimen trees and stone mansions raised from the dirt by 19th-century railroad barons, the suburb makes wealth feel like weather, an ozone layer shrouding everything — ambient, constant and vital.
Elysia Berman’s parents owned the smallest house on their block. But they worked hard to catapult their daughter into the moneyed circles of their neighbors. They sent her to a pricey Philadelphia private school where kids fished Louis Vuitton Neverfulls and Hermès Constances out of Porsche convertibles; Berman, meanwhile, toted her books in an L.L. Bean backpack bedecked with Wite-Out. Her envy and unease only mushroomed when she moved to New York City, at 18, to study illustration at the Pratt Institute. While she spent spring breaks clocking hourly wages, her friends — heiresses and overseas noblesse who kitted themselves in off-runway Gareth Pugh and their off-campus apartments in $3,000 sheets — were gliding down alpine slopes.
“I’d grown up around enough wealth to know how to correctly pronounce ‘Gstaad,’ but I’d never been there and I probably will never go,” Berman told me. Embarrassed by her own yearning, she thought often about a line from “The Great Gatsby,” when a reproachful Nick Carraway accompanies Tom Buchanan to a plush soirée: “I was within and without.”
In 2014, when Berman was 25, she landed her dream job as a designer at the fashion magazine InStyle — a place where employees’ appearances ventriloquized their ambitions. The accessory du jour was the Proenza Schouler PS1, a strappy, angular $1,000 satchel. Berman found one in orange snakeskin for $430 on The RealReal. She hesitated. Was she being ridiculous? Her salary barely covered the rent on her teacup-size apartment. But then, on the checkout page, a little line of text under the total amount caught her attention: “Pay in four interest-free installments with Affirm.”
She’d never hit a button so fast.
“I felt like that bitch in that bag,” Berman remembers. After so many years “seeing everyone around you have a nicer life than you,” she was overjoyed to get a taste for herself. Taking home such a treasure for only a small cost upfront felt like stumbling upon a cheat code — “a kind of unlock.”
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The post They Got to Live a Life of Luxury. Then Came the Fine Print. appeared first on New York Times.
