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Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of the LVMH luxury conglomerate, would not be one of the world’s wealthiest people if the company stuck to selling Louis Vuitton trunks and Moët & Chandon champagne only to the top 1 percent. LVMH invested in the DFS network of duty-free stores in airports and shopping malls around the world, which make luxury goods more accessible and affordable.
Our fear of being seen as cheaters makes us more likely to borrow status symbols from one status tier up and not higher.
Kantian taste requires us to find pleasure in things that take time and effort to appreciate: classical music, avant-garde art, postmodern novels, and gourmet cuisine.
As we learned before, the highest-status individuals can’t imitate anyone lower on the hierarchy and, therefore, must make distinctive choices. Great taste requires uniqueness.
Successful artists forge unique sensibilities by combining preexisting artifacts and conventions in new ways. The movies of director Quentin Tarantino pay direct homage to older films, and yet in 2018 the Oxford English Dictionary recognized “Tarantinoesque” as a term describing a distinct cinematic style.
shortcut for great taste is arbitrage, finding easily procured things in one location and then deploying them elsewhere where they’re rare. Stylish teenagers from the Bronx in the 1970s would avoid shopping on nearby Fordham Road where everyone bought clothes, and instead take the subway down to Delancey Street in Lower Manhattan to buy “nice and fresh” clothes unavailable uptown.
Before debuting as a novelist, Edith Wharton published a volume on home design in which she recommended Americans avoid the “superficial application of ornament totally independent of structure” and instead choose design where “the architecture of the room became its decoration.”
Suitability means conformity to certain standards, and here we get a hint of how authenticity can become a prison. For all the infinite choices in life, we are “allowed” to associate publicly only with ones “suitable” to our immutable characteristics and background.
Blue jeans may be an “American” garment, but Japanese textile mills have better preserved earlier American production techniques, such as natural indigo-dyed, slubby fabric woven on narrow looms.
In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche explains, “The ordinary man . . . waits for an opinion about himself and then instinctively submits to it,” while “it is the intrinsic right of masters to create values.”
Advising everyone to “be yourself” is therefore unfair as a broad mandate in a world still marked by bias: not everyone is born into a set of privileged attributes and behaviors.
Our brains are always engaged in rationalization: framing raw demands from our subconscious as well-grounded, logical requests. Psychologist Bruce Hood elaborates, “Even if you deliberate over an idea, turning it over in your conscious mind, you are simply delaying the final decision that has, to all intents and purposes, already been made.” Later, “having been presented with a decision,
We should therefore abandon the fantasy of pursuing identities that transcend status. Even those who drop out of society to pursue an ascetic, solitary life end up with a status. And thanks to the principle of detachment, withdrawal often becomes an effective path toward higher social position.
Conspicuous consumption is a universal language: it’s obvious evidence of wealth. No cultural capital is needed to read its codes. Any uninformed, impoverished child from any region on earth would be able to assess the scale of Drake’s fortune.
The rich in industrial societies can also signal wealth through conspicuous leisure—playing in public while everyone else is hard at work.
Middle-class students pursue higher education to acquire useful skills for a professional career, but scions of the rich can spend that same time learning ancient Greek and Latin.
Chisholm’s great-grandmother Rosa Frederica Baring was so Old Money that after divorcing his great-grandfather, she married into the British royal family.
Old Money refuses to engage in demonstrating their raw wealth. They emphasize modesty and detachment and, when needing to signal, deploy status symbols that emphasize time being rich over sheer wealth. From this perspective, Old Money taste may be more oblique than New Money taste, but it’s no less mechanical.
By eschewing grand luxury purchases like Porsches and new Cartier Tank watches, Old Money effectively makes New Money excesses stand out as desperate attempts to signal—placing a spotlight on their violation of the detachment principle.
Yes, but Old Money often doesn’t need to signal in the first place. The hereditary rich enjoy a strong reputation in their communities. Moreover, they care about receiving status only from their Old Money peers, who will pick up on their subtle cues.
In the United States, Old Money flocked to stable “traditional styles” in the finest natural materials—such as wool, cotton, and linen—rather than synthetic polyester. Such choices were fundamental to the artifacts and conventions known as the “preppy wardrobe,”
As The Bluffer’s Guide to British Class jokes, “Taste is entirely a Middle Class concern. The Lower Class don’t have it and the Upper Class don’t need it.”
The professional classes compete through consumer choice because cultural capital—the knowledge of specific conventions—can get them further ahead in the world than any future chance at giant fortunes. By competing on taste, they can best rivals in their own ranks, impress Old Money, and embarrass New Money.
The Official Preppy Handbook jokes that Ivy League students from humble backgrounds in the 1980s forgot “all about Corvettes, real college football (Michigan vs. Ohio State), and sober moderation when enjoying a good time” and learned to “favor BMW’s, fake college football (Williams vs. Amherst), and drowning in a whitecapped sea of Molson, Becks, and Heineken (light or dark).”
Most white-collar middle managers would blanch at leasing a Ferrari or flying first class to Bora Bora with Louis Vuitton luggage trunks, but would find it sensible to buy high-quality, long-lasting products that confidently disparage conspicuous consumption.
Media companies catering to this class create middlebrow entertainment: high-minded yet easily digestible content looking to reward an educated audience through winking references to their acquired knowledge. The greatest example may be The Simpsons, which mixes cartoonish ultraviolence with piquant social satire and passing allusions to Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In the last three decades, the professional class has splintered into two distinct factions. Those who work in investment banking, private equity, management consulting, and specialized forms of medicine and law often achieve fortunes on par with the lower ranks of New Money. Once they have the resources to signal through raw wealth, their tastes veer closer to conspicuous consumption.
Many creators and manufacturers—from Bauhaus to Sweden’s IKEA and Japan’s Muji—have attempted to fight kitsch by providing low-priced, mass-manufactured items in minimalist “good taste.” But these goods can be insulting to those without capital. “Consumers of kitsch,” writes the philosopher of art Tomáš Kulka, “do not buy kitsch because it is kitsch; they buy it because they take it for art.”
Minimalism is always a privilege; in signaling, the poor can’t afford to look generic. The goal instead is maximal ornamentation on even the cheapest objects.
Similar outcast groups appeared elsewhere: hipsters, greasers, and outlaw bikers in the United States; bodgies and widgies in Australia; ducktails in South Africa; zazous and blousons noirs in France; skinnknuttar and raggare in Sweden; and bosozoku biker gangs in Japan.
“For the first time, kids didn’t want to look like their fathers,” writes the journalist Nik Cohn about British postwar youth culture. “In fact, whatever their fathers looked like, they wanted to look exactly opposite.” Youth culture enabled teens to flip the script and create criteria that made them superior to their prim parents.
To discourage drug use in the 1970s, educators and publishers relied on a fictional diary called Go Ask Alice, in which a girl takes an accidental dose of LSD and falls into a tragic life of addiction, sex work, and homelessness.
Alice alice. Who the ....
The requirements on members can get more extreme when subcultures start to shrink in size.
This phenomenon echoes a principle seen in linguistics: languages of small Indigenous populations develop more complicated grammars and more difficult sounds than widely spoken tongues. When subcultures are small cults, the most dedicated members receive more status than hangers-on, which incentivizes the core members to indulge in even more extreme practices with higher signaling costs.
Pinnacle was a rural Jamaican commune providing its Black residents a “socialistic life” removed from the oppression of British colonialism. Its founder, Leonard Howell, preached an unorthodox mix of Christianity and Eastern spiritualism: Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie was considered divine, the Pope was the devil, and marijuana was a holy plant.
Marley eventually took up its credo, and as his music spread around the world in the 1970s, so did the conventions of Rastafarianism—from dreadlocks, now known as “locs,” as a fashionable hairstyle to calling marijuana “ganja.”
The primary sites for subculture/creative-class cross-pollination have been art schools and underground music scenes. The punk community, in particular, arose as an alliance between the British working class and students in art and fashion schools.
Art school students could listen to reggae without believing in the divinity of Haile Selassie. For many burgeoning creative-class members, subcultures and countercultures offered vehicles for daydreaming about an exciting life far from conformist boredom.
Before radical styles can diffuse as products, they are defused—i.e., the most transgressive qualities are surgically removed. Experimental and rebellious genres come to national attention by means of softer second-wave compromises.
but many youth simply deploy rebellious styles as a blunt invective against adults. N.W.A’s song “Fuck tha Police” gave voice to Black resentment against Los Angeles law enforcement; white suburban teens blasted it from home cassette decks to anger their parents.
From the nineteenth century onward, gay subcultures have spearheaded the camp sensibility—described by Susan Sontag as a “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” including great sympathy for the “old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé.”
If punk were truly a genuine expression of individuality, as John Lydon claims it should be, there could never have been a punk “uniform.”
One day in 1908 Pablo Picasso was scrounging through a pile of canvases in the Parisian junk shop Père Soulier, when he spotted a halting portrait of a woman. The shopkeeper offered a bargain: “Five francs. You can paint on the back.” Upon closer inspection Picasso realized the abandoned painting was an 1895 work by Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier (“the customs officer”).
When the unnamed narrator of Breakfast at Tiffany’s meets his charismatic neighbor Holly Golightly, she asks, “Tell me, are you a real writer? . . . Well, darling, does anyone buy what you write?”
Brutal
But the reason popular artists receive higher status in contemporary society than surgeons, sushi chefs, and charity workers is that they engage in mental sorcery: proposing radical ideas that go on to change the world.
In the eighteenth century, philosopher Immanuel Kant asserted three still authoritative criteria for artistic genius: (1) the creation of fiercely original works, (2) which over time become imitated as exemplars, and (3) are created through mysterious and seemingly inimitable methods.
Artists who create their works as a form of violent, uncontrolled catharsis have no time for signaling strategies.
Artists are permitted to miss deadlines, because no one can schedule divine epiphanies.
The philosopher Noël Carroll examined the primary definitions of art—art as representation, art as expression, art as form, etc.—and found that most collapse once the category “art” must include twentieth-century avant-garde works such as Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made urinal sculpture, Fountain.
Pablo Picasso’s radical cubist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a signature piece at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—but arguably for its artistic importance, not its aesthetic achievement. Picasso’s art dealer believed this painting of Barcelona prostitutes to be “unfinished,” and many of Picasso’s peers found it in bad taste.
