Conspicuous consumption getting more onstage

The rise of the aspirational class and its consumer habits is perhaps most salient in the United States.

None of the consumer choices that the term covers are inherently obvious or ostensibly material but they are, without question, exclusionary.

These new status behaviours are what I call вЂinconspicuous consumptionвЂ™. This new elite cements its status through prizing knowledge and building cultural capital, not to mention the spending habits that go with it вЂ“ preferring to spend on services, education and human-capital investments over purely material goods. But the dramatic changes in elite spending are driven by a well-to-do, educated elite, or what I call the вЂaspirational classвЂ™. Yes, oligarchs and the superrich still show off their wealth with yachts and Bentleys and gated mansions. Given that everyone can now buy designer handbags and new cars, the rich have taken to using much more tacit signifiers of their social position. On the surface, the ostensible consumer objects favoured by these two groups no longer reside in two completely different universes. They both lease SUVs, take airplanes, and go on cruises. In the face of rising social inequality, both the rich and the middle classes own fancy TVs and nice handbags. However, the democratisation of consumer goods has made them far less useful as a means of displaying status. At the same time, weвЂ™ve seen the arrival of a middle-class consumer market that demands more material goods at cheaper price points. This deluge of accessible luxury is a function of the mass-production economy of the 20th century, the outsourcing of production to China, and the cultivation of emerging markets where labour and materials are cheap. More than 100 years later, conspicuous consumption is still part of the contemporary capitalist landscape, and yet today, luxury goods are significantly more accessible than in VeblenвЂ™s time. In VeblenвЂ™s now famous treatise The Theory of the Leisure Class, he coined the phrase вЂconspicuous consumptionвЂ™ to denote the way that material objects were paraded as indicators of social position and status. In 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen observed that silver spoons and corsets were markers of elite social position.

Conspicuous consumption getting more onstage