We have lost the art of collecting
We have no physical trace of our interests and our personalities anymore, and no desire to collect it, not even for ourselves.
Upon the hypothetical, and slightly morbid discussion around my Grandad’s eventual death, the question arose of what my family would do with all of his collections. He is a collector of old bank notes, of whiskey, of stamps, of vinyl records, magnets, and of many other things. These are collections of not just physical items, but of time at auction houses, of travel destinations, of searching for hours in the back-ends of vintage stores to find some other Grandfather’s relics. It is years of love and dedication to individual collections that when combined, are so clearly telling of his character.
I am 21 years old, and though I cannot compare my own life-contents to that of my 80-year-old Grandad, what I do know is that we as a generation have lost the art of collecting. I can pin it on two reasons: the death of physical media and our demanding, over-consuming society.
Physical media has been replaced by digital media amid our quest to technologically advance everything we do and make. We don’t store tangible items anymore, and we rarely even own the things we do collect. The modern-day vinyl collectors are the only ones who own their music, the rest of us own Spotify subscriptions and firesticks. Magazines, DVD’s, photo albums, recipes, even academic hand-ins: all digitised. I worry about the preservation of all these things not just for our older selves to look back on, but for us to pass on. We have no physical trace of our interests and our personalities anymore, and no desire to collect it, not even for ourselves.
The other factor at hand is that anything physically collectable, worthy of gathering piece by piece, is purchasable at large nowadays, instantly. If you really wanted every Sonny Angel, you could buy them all. Hey, I even saw them on TikTok shop!!! Capitalism has eradicated the art of waiting, searching, and securing, for what we collect nowadays are our parcels that we ordered last night, delivered to our door today. There’s no waiting, there’s no hunting, we can have it all now! To run with Sonny Angels as a perfect example, if we do derive value and rarity within a 21st century item and deem it collectable, there’s every chance it falls to the fate of trendiness, and thus the quick death of mass production and consumption. Then over to the next. What Urban Outfitters trinket can we consume by large then throw away in the span of 3 months next?
I think the last time I felt the true value of collecting was in the peak of the 2018 beauty guru phenomenon and my 15-year-old self began collecting £16 MAC lipsticks. The girls in school with the rich parents grew their collections by five overnight, but theirs did not run the same value as my own, for it was the time, the work, the hunt, the save, and the wait that derived true value in adding to that collection. Truthfully, I do in fact still have these to my name. They are expired and collecting dust in my childhood bedroom but remain one of the truest physical signifiers of that time period in my life, and dare I say I can’t bring myself to throw them out, all seven of them.
Besides from the lipsticks, the truest and possibly only run of a collection I have is all of the magnets on my fridge bought in each destination I’ve visited since turning 18. It is a collection inspired by my Grandad, whose seasoned passports mean there is little-to-no white space left on his fridge. With every pass by, every cup of tea made in his kitchen, physical symbols of each trip stare back at me as I consume decades worth of a story unfold, piece by piece. I don’t just want to see physical media in 2025, I want to hold it, store it, and collect it.
