AS AMERICANS FLOCK to glassy stores all over the nation to buy white onepocket T-shirts and buttonfly jeans, as the owners of Bennigan's and T.G.I. Friday's sit at their fern-ensconced tables to count their millions, as another Virginia family drives away with another unassembled tan sofa from Ikea, our senses of place and identity vanish into the democratic emptiness of Gapified America.

The Gapification of America has been sneaking up on us for more than a decade, and now, with the omnipresence of wellmade, monchromal cotton sweaters, of grilled chicken sandwiches with honey mustard sauce, of blond wood and black halogen floor lamps, it has finally triumphed. It is a victory for democracy: these products are relatively cheap, handsome and well made. No one has ever looked ugly in a Gap shirt.

But it is a tragedy for American individuality. Gapified culture asserts its uniqueness, asserts that its consumption somehow makes the consumer special.

The only way Gapified culture can succeed is if it is mass culture, if it can make anybody special. We buy it first, thinking it makes us special, then we notice that everyone else is wearing jeans, T-shirts and blazers, and is eating the szechuan noodle salad. At the same time, those people who aren't Gapified are left to rot; not important, not "individuals of style."

THE GAP IS, of course, the great power behind Gapified culture, at least in clothing. In the last six years, Gap, Inc., has doubled its number of stores (now 1300), doubled the sales-per-store, and doubled and redoubled its advertising budget. Even during this recession, Gap sales are up 20 percent, now over $2 billion a year.

One way to took at the sales figures is a quick per capita sales analysis: on average, every single person in America spent almost $10 at the Gap last year, or, what is more likely, 10 percent of Americans spent about $80 each.

The essence of Gap clothing is uniformity. Gap has a palette of colors, and all its clothes come in that palette. (Pink underwear was abandoned recently because it didn't match the palette; that omnipresent ochre-pumpkin color and its attendant mossy green did.)

The clothes are well-made, simple, conservative, casual and inexpensive--no neon, no garish patterns that you can't adjust to in a few minutes, a few stripes, plaids in shorts, maybe a funky belt or snazzy pair of socks, but nothing that would ever seem threatening to a high school principal. Gapified clothes are crisp twill pants, slightly tapered jeans, solidcolor turtlenecks, soft button-down shirts in softer colors. You know what they are. You are wearing some.

But the Gap is just the tip of the iceberg. Virtually every successful clothing store or catalog offers the same thing as the Gap. J. Crew is mail-order Gap. Tweeds is mailorder Gap with more patterns. Lands' End is mail-order Gap for more conservative dressers. L.L. Bean is mail-order Gap with plaid and boots. Bennetton is Gap with brighter colors. The Limited is Gap with more design. Banana Republic, which is owned by the Gap, is Gap with more pockets and more khaki.

SUCH IS THE GAPIFIED fashion world. We are what we wear. We are Gapified. But Gapifation has extended to food--we are what we eat. The last decade has witnessed an explosion of restaurants filled with brass and glass, Murphy's Oil Soaped wood, Tiffany lamps and ferns, lots of ferns. Part bar, part restaurant, part amusement park, these mini-herbaria all bring us the same mediocre food at the same modest prices, the same all over the country.

Benningan's, Houlihan's and T.G.I. Friday's are the standard models, serving big burgers, pasta salads, grilled shrimp and chicken, buffalo wings, mozzarella sticks, pitchers of soda and beer, cheap wine, cheesecake and always, always a "Death by Chocolate."

On the ethnic wing of this are things like Chili's or Chevy's which serve denatured Mexican food with the same pleasant, harmless tastes as their Anglo-counterparts.

Gapification has an equally firm grasp on design and architecture. It's almost impossible to find a new apartment or house without blond wood, high ceilings, big windows and large white walls.

In that same apartment are the requisite halogen lamp, Ikea or Conran's furniture, and the keys to the new Volkswagen (farfigwhat?). Less slick than Scandinavian, more comfortable than Bauhaus, Gapified design does not produce spaces to come home to, but spaces to come visit.

This total Gapification is the self-assertion of the middle classes. Gap clothes are inexpensive by Vogue standards, but not K-Mart's. Gapified food is not Le Cirque, but it is a conscious step above fast food. It is the culture of the Bush Era.