When I was growing up, we didn’t buy our clothes from catalogs—except maybe for the occasional item from J.C. Penny. We bought our clothes, like almost everything else, at Target. My tastes ran to shorts and t-shirts in summer, sweats in the winter. I disdained jeans as being something the conformist popular kids wore. (Also, I was kind of chubby.)

My introduction to the L.L. Bean catalog came via families I baby-sat for. I’d page through, fascinated by all the rugged fancy people wearing fancy rugged clothes. I wondered if that was what my life would be like when I grew up: standing around on docks, lounging in Adirondack chairs, walking on beaches with sweaters tied around my shoulders.

One day I pronounced to my mother, with an air of gravity appropriate to the momentous occasion, that I was ready to start wearing jeans. Specifically, I wanted a pair of black jeans, lined in red flannel, from the L.L. Bean catalog. They duly arrived, and I thought I could almost smell the Maine on them. Per design they were hot as hell, but I wore them until the flannel thinned and tore away.

As the 40-something teenager I was, I read a lot of Consumer Reports in those days. When the magazine ran a feature comparing clothing catalogs and determined that L.L. Bean offered the best quality-for-price proposition, I was sold: clearly, L.L. Bean represented perfection in clothing, or as close to such a thing as we could achieve on this mortal plane. I started ordering everything I wore from L.L. Bean.

This habit continued through college and into graduate school. L.L. Bean’s saturation of my wardrobe probably reached its peak around 2004, when a woman I was dating said she described me to her mother as looking like I stepped straight out of an L.L. Bean catalog.

Why the strange persistence of my relationship with L.L. Bean? Well, for starters, I liked the economy of procuring clothes only from what I took to be the ideal clothier: not so much the fiscal economy as the conceptual economy. Instead of trying to choose from the dizzying variety of clothing options at shopping malls, I just ordered my clothes from the one ideal source of clothing. Done and done.

Then there was the contrarian appeal of ordering my clothes from a company best known for purveying fishing and hunting gear to middle-aged men. I was not middle-aged, and not only did I not fish or hunt, I actively disdained all forms of outdoor recreation. I liked the idea of dressing in a manner that would confuse people as to my true lifestyle.

But what was my true lifestyle—or, more to the point, what lifestyle did I want? In retrospect, it seems that my interest in L.L. Bean rose and fell in correlation to my conflicted fascination with the bourgeois lifestyles of the families I baby-sat for.

Baby-sitting accounted for a significant chunk of my income through college and into grad school, and one reason I enjoyed it was the window it provided into the lives of families other than my own. Most weren’t what you’d call rich, but almost all of them had more money than my family: typically, both parents worked at professional jobs (my mom stayed home to take care of us), they had fewer kids than my family had (four), and the kids went to public school for free (we went to Catholic school, not for free). So they could afford luxuries like nicer cars, individually wrapped snacks, and Starbucks coffee beans.

But it wasn’t just that they had more money: with the money seemed to come a certain well-adjustment. The parents were best friends with each other, and parented cooperatively. (My parents loved us and loved each other, but they didn’t sit around swapping funny stories about their workdays, or chatting about the merits of the new Salman Rushdie novel.) The kids sometimes yelled, but the parents rarely did. (Of course, things might have been different when I wasn’t around.) Piles of literary fiction, yoga manuals, travel guides, and copies of the New York Times testified to a deliberate engagement with the project of bettering the world and themselves. (The corresponding stacks at my house contained Sports Illustrated, mystery novels, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press.) And what did they wear? L.L. Bean.

By 2005, I’d diversified my sartorial holdings into Orvis and Patagonia, clothing myself increasingly like a man looking forward to his golden years with his golden retriever at his side. (A further irony, since I’m not a dog person.) I started dating someone who saw me as more of a Banana Republic guy, and over the year and a half that we were a couple, she encouraged me to transition from fleece to cashmere—her first priority was to delete from my wardrobe anything with leather trim.

I never quite saw myself as a Banana Republic type, but by the time we broke up, my default recourse to L.L. Bean and other outdoorsy clothing catalogs had been broken, and I never went back. I’ve ordered one, maybe two, things from L.L. Bean since 2007—but many artifacts from my 15 years of Beandom survive in my wardrobe. There are several pairs of shorts, several button-down shirts (though none with leather trim), a polo shirt, and even a couple of pairs of socks. Consumer Reports was right: L.L. Bean does make a quality product.

– Jay Gabler