The American middle classes spent their eight years under Reagan spending, trying to live up to the glitz. Image was everything, and Polo was the rage. The Polo store, with its antiqued mahogany, riding gear and posh addresses crafted an image of a glorious Edwardian gentry past that America never had.

It was expensive, and that was what mattered: the embroidered horseman ushered in a new era of logo-centrism. And if you couldn't afford it, you knew you sucked, and you bought something like it.

Today, middle class Americans (unlike the federal government) are paying the price for their expense. Gapified culture is a retrenchment, a return not to cheapness, but to a viable, attractive, inexpensive consumption that promises individuality and democracy.

IT IS AN American tradition. "What's great about this country," Andy Warhol wrote, "is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink a Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."

Warhol wanted a democratic culture, but he had no illusions about individuality. "Someone said Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It's happening here all by itself without being under a strict government; so if it's working without trying, why can't it work without being Communist? Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way."

That was Warhol's ideal, and he got what he wanted. But, the Gap promises uniformity not uniqueness, and this is its terrible danger. Promising what it cannot deliver, Gapification erodes our senses of place and self, with huge social costs.

ABOUT TWO YEARS AGO, Gap began its "Individuals of Style" adverstising campaign. In glossy magazines all over the country, Gap took out full page ads for which famous photographers like Anne Liebovitz and Herb Ritts took pictures of famous or interesting Americans wearing Gap clothes. Mostly these people wore the most basic Gap clothes, often just a white T-shirt and jeans.

The message of the ads is that these famous people don't need fancy clothing to express their individuality. They are cool regardless of what clothing they wear. So a white T-shirt does not necessarily mean a bland personality--it means that you are not what you wear.

Yet the entire point of the campaign is to make us buy Gap clothes. It only works if millions of us buy white T-shirts. And the sad fact is, Ronnie Lott and Joni Mitchell can be unique in Gap clothing because they do amazing, successful, celebrated things. But when we wear Gap clothing, we melt into the rest of the crowd that is also wearing it, because we don't stand out.

Joni Mitchell is famous, so we see her as a wonderful singer, not as a middle-aged woman in a jean jacket. When we wear our jean jackets, however, we are judged as jean-jacket wearing types, and our individuality is subsumed under our clothes.

Watching Gap commercials, you would never think this was possible. George Michaels's "Freedom '90" plays in the background. A group of Chinese children are running down a flight of stairs. They are all wearing Mao hats, drab coats, monochrome school uniforms. Except one. He runs down, attired in Gap clothes--jeans, plaid shirt, smiling--bringing American democracy to the Communist state.

Such is the image. The American reality is the mirror image: Our Mao hat is the Gap pocket tee.

GAPIFIED CULTURE is also destroying American sense of place. As Gapification spreads across the country, as malls everywhere pick up their Limited Express and fern-bar restaurants, locational individuality vanishes. Chili's tells us that its restaurants are "Like no place else."

This is, of course, a lie. The Chili's on Mount Auburn St. is the same as the Chili's on Huntington Ave. In Boston is the same as the Chili's on 3rd Ave. in New York is the same as the Chevy's in San Francisco is the same as every Bennigan's is the same as every Houlihan's is the same every T.G.I. Friday's. Every Gap is like every other Gap, whether you are in London, England, Austin, Texas, or Durham, North Carolina. And every Gap is like every Limited or Bennetton.

This syntopia has become so radical that we do not even need a place: mail-order proliferation is the natural outcome of this. For all practical purposes, there is no "Lands' End." But you can be sure that its clothes will be the same no matter where you make your toll-free call from.