A hundred years ago, a new comic strip was published in the New York Globe. Called Keep Up With The Joneses, it featured the adventures of a family vainly trying to keep up with their well-to-do neighbors. Mr and Mrs McGinis and their daughter were social climbers, people desperately wanting others to think of them as higher on the ladder of success than they really were. The strip was so popular that the term passed into general usage.
Even older than Keeping Up With The Joneses is the notion of conspicuous consumption, first defined by sociologist Thorsten Veblen in his classic 1899 sociological critique, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen’s concept of a “leisure class” was constructed long before F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, but you get the idea.
Leisure classes emerge in societies where there are significant class distinctions and the upper classes are exempt from productive work. A simple contemporary definition of conspicuous consumption is spending money on expensive things so as to impress other people.
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Eric B and Rakim tied for third, each one’s hanging gold worth $100,000.
The best status symbols are portable
If they are kept at home or in a safe deposit box, few people will see our status symbols and perceptions of our positions will not be enhanced. If we carry them around with us, more people can see them, and that’s the point. How often do you see status seekers set their shiny new toy on the table or on the bar, where we can’t miss it?
Readily identifiable status items are important to higher and lower social strata alike
At the higher end, handbags, wristwatches, sunglasses, and luggage all need to be instantly recognizable as expensive, hence the logos and proprietary designs.
For those on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, clothing with names writ large and ostentatious jewelry are used to establish status
Ironically, as people at the lower end of socioeconomic scales have less experience with luxury goods, the status items need not be authentic to impress the peer group. While high income people can tell a real Rolex from a fake and diamonds from paste, lower income groups are less likely to be able to do so.
One particularly amusing display is the wearing of ball caps, usually with an athletic connection, with the shiny authentication stickers and price tags left on to signal one concept of cool. Whoever knew Minnie Pearl in her flowered straw hat with the $1.98 price tag still on would be such a trendsetter?
As Great Grandmama used to say, “In my day, people wore clothes with the labels on the inside.”
