Flaunting Expense or Thrift

At it’s core, fashion (as well as other non-survival goods and expressions) has two basic purposes:

• To facilitate artistic/aesthetic expression as a mode of leisure or creativity.
• To reflect social information (belonging to a group, reflecting social status as linked to economic status, etc.).

The second purpose (social signaling), as we’ve mentioned before, includes the theory of conspicuous consumption. Briefly, the theory states that people use expensive clothing as an indicator of financial means, which have consistently been tied to social status in the modern world. Why social status is so directly correlated with financial means (in the vast majority of cases) is another question for another time.

In watching interactions of people over the years, I’ve noticed that things aren’t so cut and dry. Certainly, not all of us try to buy the most expensive things possible and then make people painfully aware of the fact (though many people like that are out there). For many, especially in this strange, evolving cultural climate of hipsterism, the sustainability movement, and the recession, we pride ourselves on not spending money , on not wasting time and resources. The society is still class-based in many senses, and we can see the results in our analysis of consumerism:

Income Demarcations

Under Veblen’s original theory, each of us would try to buy as much unnecessary goods (less so services, since they’re not as easily showcased) as our income would allow, so as to appear that our income was larger, large enough to comfortably spend money on such vagaries. In reality, we would be like ducks; looking calm and content on the surface, but paddling madly beneath the surface to support a lifestyle at the edge of our means.

To a large extent, this is still quite true. Conspicuous consumption may very well be the culprit of the “credit crunch,” as many people gamed the system (taking out multiple mortgages, many lines of credit, etc.) to construct a lifestyle (luxurious, unnecessarily large homes, inefficient cars, designer goods) that was well beyond their means.

However, there is some subtlety here, and I do not believe this behavior is universal, but that it depends on a category of income:

• The super-rich among us (tens of millions or more) do not need to signal their economic status in today’s connected world, their company logos, banking portfolios, and reputations usually precede them. Instead, they must fight against an elitist, corrupt image due to recent scandals among the very rich. Actions, like the mayor of New York working for a salary of $1, are in a sense conspicuous (because they’re saying the don’t need the money), but are not consumption. There is still a deliberate effort to signify social status, but through the mechanism of restraint, rather than excess. Ultra-rich people (i.e. Bill Gates) may take this a step further with conspicuous donations of money and time to charitable and non-profit organizations.
• The middle to upper-middle class is the biggest culprit of conspicuous consumerism. These people often have enough means to feign the life of a super-rich person, and this often represents an increase in their social status. Further, the benefit of moderate overspending for this class (more shielded from taxes and corporate instability) typically outweighs the perceived risk of a few years of debt, given the stability of their six-figure jobs. Finally, whereas the super-rich must actively fight an elitist perception, due to their (often deservedly) elite position, members of the middle-class are often still in (social) competition with one another, and this engenders a need for “keeping up” or “one-upping” the neighbors/colleagues/family members, facilitating a conspicuous consumption mindset.
• On the other hand, members of the lower to lower-middle class do not have the means (through any financial tricks) to emulate a rich lifestyle, and tend to find the behavior of the upper-middle class as hypocritical and vapid, and thus eschew it. This is the “savers” culture, the group of people which prides itself on being practical, saving money for the future, and “getting deals.” There is unquestionably still a large part of society which views waste as waste, an irresponsible behavior (especially when trying to support a family) that should be chastised, not rewarded with social status.

Interestingly, it is this difference in mindset between (I’m generalizing here) the lower-middle and upper-middle classes about consumerism that incites the social antagonism between them (a perceived plebian/patrician or proletarian/bourgeoisie dynamic). In the end, these negative emotions are destructive, and remain part of a destructive social class system, and conspicuous consumption is just one manifestation of this animosity, an unfortunate consequence. It seems that changing conspicuous consumption is doomed to fail, unless one addresses the underlying sociological and class issues.

-Barry