Seat 46B Is Temporary...
Prompt No. 54: Status Anxiety, Airports, War... This is all over the place!
Last week, I received the following response to Luxury, Presentation, and the Myth of Widely Distributed Power:
“While the ‘Wirkin’ is such an obvious ‘no’ to me (the quality alone and its connection to Walmart is enough for me to take a pass), I still secondhand shop for things that would signify wealth. I mean, when I get dressed for the airport, I wear my eBay used Gucci loafers ($75), long wool “Row-esque” coat from the thrift sore ($10) and pack everything in my Facebook Marketplace acquired $50 Brics’ carry-on. This desire to be perceived by strangers in the airport as anything but what I am (solidly middle class, paycheck to paycheck, on my way to my two-figure salary work trip) is truly a reflection of my own internalized classism. And that, my friends, is a jarring and uncomfortable realization for someone who thinks of herself as progressive. Like, my self-hatred is showing. Woof.”
I thought about the comment off and on throughout the week. Is it classism or a response to classism? (Yes, these are the sort of questions I pour over for fun.) Following the French Revolution, aristocrats constantly revised their unspoken dress codes in order to visually distinguish themselves from those who scoured Saint Ouen for luxurious cast-offs. The elite ultimately “renounced a showy, obvious, and easily copied luxury and replaced it with the quiet, subtle, and elusive luxury we call ‘elegance,’” explained Richard Thompson Ford in Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History. “Of course there was in fact nothing casual about this elitist simplicity in dress, which wielded exacting attention to detail as a weapon in a ruthless fight for status.” The strategy worked so well that it remains a weapon of choice. However, it begs the question: what arms do the masses bear against the elite? None. We are not even on the same battlefield.
