Luxury, Presentation, and the Myth of Widely Distributed Power, Part II

Prompt No. 53: The Inevitable, Allegedly Elitist Walmart Birkin Posts

NOTE: Luxury, Presentation, and the Myth of Widely Distributed Power, Part II is available for paid subscribers only. To learn how to upgrade your subscription, click here. To read part one for free, click here.

“Each class envies and emulates the class next above it in the social scale, while it rarely compares itself with those below or with those who are considerably in advance.”
- Thorstein Veblen

Advances in communication and technology lead to shifts in consumptive behavior. As such,  social media did not create influencers so much as it professionalized them. For roughly a century, the original influencers — socialites — relied on newspapers and magazines to confer and rescind esteem. What read as salacious gossip and spellbinding glamour was, in fact, a ruthless sport. Everyone, including editors and columnists broadcasting the events (members of the leisure class in their own right), jockeyed for position. The nouveau riche especially benefited. Often unable to get an audience with New York’s High Society, wives and daughters of midwestern industrialists garnered esteem from the public. However, over a century later, as social media overtook traditional, the nouveau riche had little need for the likes of Vogue. Follower count demonstrated a new form of cultural capital that paid dividends — both socially and financially. Everyone took note.