Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. If you want to signal that you’re a serious person, few assertions are more effective than announcing that you don’t like stuff. In one corner are the mall-goers, the e-commerce-addled shopaholics, chasing the latest trend. These consumerist materialists are, goes the thinking, indifferent to the labour and environmental impact of overconsumption. In the other are those too busy saving the world – or otherwise making something of themselves – to care about such trivialities as their clothes and household implements. Thus the tech bros with wardrobes of identical...