Stores sell more than just clothes, even when they actually don’t. Every T-shirt, tank top and topsider peddles an ethos, a subculture or a promise that people will find you sexy or cool or quirky based solely on a few strips of fabric.

As Ralph Lauren famously said, “I don’t design clothes, I design dreams.”

At first, this idea struck me as, to be frank, a load of psychobabble. Are shoppers really that impressionable? It only takes one glance around campus at the bevy of prepsters in head-to-toe Polo to realize that, well, we probably are.

Acceptance of a mass-produced personality is, however, hardly limited to the preps. The American Apparel addicts proclaim the company’s dismissal of “the corporate right and the politically correct left in favor of something new” with every sweatshop-free knit. Intermix girls can be “simply defined by their penchant for fashion.”

These quotes, mind you, come directly from the company Web sites; this is the top-down view of the customer, this is what they want you to think of yourself. So the next time we enter a store, we should ask ourselves: Beyond what we buy, what are we buying into?

Take, for example, one of the most popular brands on campus and the brainchild of the aforementioned Mr. Lauren: Rugby. The secret to its success lies in the creation of a perfectly detailed world. Reuter’s company profile describes Rugby as an “aspirational lifestyle brand,” implying that they are purveyors of more then their eponymous shirts. Rugby sells an attitude. How? With their flawlessly frayed decor, for starters.

Every piece of furniture in the store seems in desperate need of repair; there is a couch with the stuffing leaking out, oriental rugs approaching threadbare and a lot of aggressively distressed leather.

Denis Ing, a junior at an area college, was lounging on one such couch this past Monday. He leafed through a coffee table book and explained the store’s appeal: “It’s a welcoming environment. No one’s pressuring you to buy clothing.”

Of course they aren’t. At Rugby, clothing isn’t the main point. Merchandise here is strewn artfully among vintage boxing gloves and David Bowie posters almost as an afterthought. An assortment of ties peer out from a tarnished silver Sigma Chi touch football trophy dated 1934-35.

If all the incredibly staged nonchalance begins to grate on you, follow Ing’s lead and settle down for a good read. Potential titles for perusing include The Doors, Italian “Men’s Vogue” and, of course, Death of a Revolutionary: Che Guevara’s Last Mission. Because where better to learn about militant Latin American communism then a prep-punk theme park designed by Ralph Lauren?

Employees assert that they personally picked out the books, based on a “general idea of what people here liked” — never mind that the tomes fit in perfectly with the store’s quasi-intellectual rebel aesthetic.

The employee’s personal attachment to the store is also evident through at least one other item there: a blue and white rugby shirt covered in signatures from everyone who opened the store on June 16, 2006. How touching. It’s like a real rugby team. Of course, none of the jovial young employees could answer any of my questions about how much they loved working there. Why? Corporate policy. Just in case you’d forgotten that behind this façade of individualism lays focus groups and marketing strategies.

The danger, however, is that people do forget. In Rugby or Anthropologie or any number of chic chain “lifestyle” stores, we find ourselves buying into it. The remedy is not to take clothing even remotely seriously. This probably sounds contradictory, considering I’ve spent over 500 relatively self-righteous words venting about fashion, but I freely include myself in the camp of people who should take their shopping trips with a grain of salt.

Clothes can make you feel beautiful or cutting-edge or athletic or any of the other adjectives designers want you to believe about yourself. But when it comes right down to it, clothes are what we put on our backs because it is neither socially acceptable nor warm enough to live our lives in the nude.

Sorry for that somewhat crude image; I’m sure the image of everyone wandering our 30 degree Fahrenheit campus buck naked will give us all some genuinely ugly dreams. Unless, of course, they’re designed by Ralph Lauren.