The rich wear non-functional foolishness in the long-held tradition that the wealthy can do whatever they want. In the new spate of “unfunctional” functional luxury items, we’re seeing the illusion of meritocracy and the inveigling power of uber-wealthy crashing together.
If those “shoes” bothered you, congratulations, you are a digital serf. But how have we gotten to the point where the American economy is nosediving while people are proudly wearing nearly nothing on their feet?
Class is a performance. Historically, royalty might be born into their positions; given the high rate of patricide and fratricide amongst monarchies, those thrones were still highly contested. Maintaining power required a constant performance of position. Crowns and scepters weren’t worn daily, but luxury was always on display.
As they say, there’s very little room at the top. Scarcity of power often brought out the worst in the people of the court. Court intrigue is evident throughout history and around the world. From the Tang Chinese court to the Renaissance Florentine one, the stories of courtiers one-upping each other read as high drama. Material culture often served as the battlefield for the refined machinations of courtiers. Having the best new silk garment or getting the best style of jewelry could catapult your position.
These styles weren’t just frivolity. In the 17th century, King Louis XIV of France wrote that “fashion is the mirror of history. It reflects social, economic, and political change rather than mere whimsy.” Why do sartorial choices reflect so much about society? First, fashion is a tool for the wealthiest. Novelty, though, in fashion was historically something only the wealthiest could enjoy. Until the Industrial Revolution, clothing represented a huge outlay in human capital from the farm to the weaver to the tailor and finally to the body. Full supply chain, as we might say today, distilled into a tool of power. In the court, after all, the most important function was spectacle, not utility or warmth.
Fashion was also tied closely to inherited wealth. Much of what courts got up to leaked to the broader public as whispers. But from the earliest days of Sumer, kings and aristocrats largely had God on their side. These flighty and wasteful people got a divine pass for their waste.1 Even with divine support, power was not promised. Regicide was often a threat, though fratricide and patricide were even more common. Court politics generally read like true crime and potential crimes. Dress saved lives, in a sense. Looking powerful often helped project importance enough to keep all murderous sons, brothers, and cousins at bay. How? Fashion often bore the symbols of power. In the Chinese court, for example, the emperor wore the five-toed dragon. For other mere mortals, this reminder of the emperor’s divine mandate became connected to the body wearing the cloth.
Marie Antoinette was living in France a century after that royal head rolled across the Channel. She became the face of waste for the French people, thanks to a one-two punch of misogyny and improved technology. The French court that the young Austrian Habsburg married into was replete with rules and systems. The veritable obstacle course of nuance allowed aristocrats to compete for power and attention. A culture of one-upsmanship and conspicuous consumption was cemented within the aristocratic class. Being an arbiter of style was a way to curry favor and assert power.
Dress served as a particular tool for drawing attention and, therefore, power. Capricious attitudes kept the tailors busy, certainly, but also allowed the court to assert position. The cost of court life often bankrupted the French aristocrats, but leaving court would mean less royal support. In this damning system, the ideal position would be to play the game extremely well so the gamble would pay off. For example, while the grand wigs of the era weren’t necessary, they were certainly functional as a marker of position. If you’re going to have to spend money on a wig, why not buy one that makes you seem obviously cutting-edge? Marie Antoinette became the figurehead of this culture of displaying wealth, but she was neither its originator nor its most egregious example.
But the spectacle of power at the French court became a theater of horror for ordinary French people, thanks to the timing. Marie Antoinette ruled at a time when color printing had become fairly affordable and incredibly popular. [As I’ve written, printmaking helped cement public sentiment in our revolution](http://Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Two-Headed Monster), and printmakers similarly helped people visualize their enemy. The conspicuous elements of court that helped her maintain power in the closed environment of court seemed ridiculous when seen by the broad audience. For example, the feathers that fluttered pleasantly as women danced became like Medusa’s snakes in this 1791 print. From dance floor to damnation, the utility as a marker of wealth didn’t matter to people outside that system, particularly people who were starving. The Revolution was largely a reaction to drought, taxation, and years of government mismanagement.
The Industrial Revolution transformed clothing but not the power of spectacle in wealth. Why? Susan B. Kaiser suggests that “fashion, like culture, is both a social process and a material practice [which] simultaneously undergo[s] continual change and continuity.” In other words, fashion affords new money old ways to perform power, effectively dressing for the status they’re attempting to join. In the Gilded Age, many Americans who achieved great wealth came from modest means. While they weren’t truly hay seeds, as the myth goes, for wealthy Americans, the culture clash between the new wealthy and the older ways was startling.
As I’ve discussed before, the newness of the US, as compared to European nations, meant that the colonists were quick to create many of the trappings of taste. Those generational markers, like the connection to the Mayflower or family portraits by Copley, became gatekeeping tools to prevent upstarts from taking their place. Without aristocratic titles, material culture takes on a particularly key role in telegraphing power. If wealth alone determined class, the old order might lose its status, which was particularly important given how many of the oldest families had become land-rich, cash-poor after the Civil War. The Gilded Age saw new money seeking to cement its place with the old guard. As such, they built where the wealthy built. But while they attempted to mimic old money, the specific markers of taste in the United States are often so subtle that they are hard to replicate without experience. In other words, the old-money people had set up a system that was hard to understand and required you to jump through many hoops. The newly wealthy tried to meet the standards of the old guard, for example, by collecting European art.
That said, the new wealthy also pushed the older norms of taste. While American old money didn’t generally court the media, the new guard regularly flaunted their wealth with very lavish parties, say, having dinner inside on the back of a horse, and they spent wild sums of money, quite publicly, hoping to get press attention. Their performance of power was not just for each other but also for the world. Why? They saw their wealth as a result of their acumen. They earned this wealth, and they did social good from their benevolence (or guilt), as I’ve discussed before in the gospel of wealth. Their display of wealth didn’t end their power as it did for French royalty, but the lavish lives they led in public became fodder for the rise of Progressive Era politicians.
If you wonder why one of the richest men on the planet decided to have a very public wedding rather than keep it to himself, it’s because, for his audience, i.e., the other ultra-wealthy, he wants to perform wealth. They’re taking the Gilded Age belief that they’re due their wealth to the nth degree, moving beyond print gossip columns to every phone on the planet. Courts performed for each other; 19th-century wealth performed for itself and small-scale public attention; 21st-century money performs for everyone.
This type of global performance, though, has many hurdles. Consider how Marie Antoinette’s feathers got transformed in tabloids. That type of intellectual transformation from whimsy to weapon is even more forceful when everyone can mock you.
This generation's uber-wealthy has the same disconnect as the French Monarchy or the Robber Barons. Jeff Bezos essentially bought a wedding for his wedding extravaganza, which seemed more like an exercise in how expensive poorly fitted clothes can be. Any person in Trump’s America would know the wealthy aren’t heroes, and they might think, let’s cool our conspicuous consumption. But people like Bezos are living in a different Trump’s America, the one for the 1%. All of those people see their wealth as deserved. But, unlike the Gilded Age Robber Barons, they’re not also performing public works. Their conspicuous consumption is not mitigated by anything positive.
Their lack of philanthropy is tied to their ostentatious displays of wealth. As I wrote about with the Met Gala, the technofeudalists are largely the lamest guys in high school who got wealthy and now act in ways that try to heal the original wound of being unlikable. One might suggest you could learn to be likable, but they have a better idea: just buy your way into friends. With their hands on the purse strings, plenty of people will chum it up. This is why so much of the popular culture, like film and fashion, which in previous generations would’ve issued anybody with a whiff of conservatism, has gotten into bed with the techno-feudalists. Culture historically needs money to be produced. They understand how to perform wealth, but through their upper-middle-class upbringings. Big yachts, obvious name brands, fancy cars. They were watching millionaires on Robin Leech (mentioned in the Epstein files) rather than enriching their souls.
In the 21st century, the people with the money to pay for culture don’t know how to enjoy culture. These are men who’ve demeaned humanities and never fostered interior lives. They’re the kind of weird that repulses, not attracts, because their only interest is themselves. Seattle and San Francisco should have the richest museums and symphonies, but instead these dorks are spending all that money on looking cool for the world. What a waste given how lame they come off.
While wealth is a performance, it needs to be mitigated through curiosity and personality. For this generation's uber-wealthy, they’re also performing, though, for the world. When everyone sees you with a target on your back, you better hit a bull’s-eye. Sadly, they’re only validating their options with each other. Their team is equally blind. In the end, their style is a complete performance of money without the magic of spectacle.
Writing about the Gilded Age, Thorstein Veblen said, “Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.” But what happens when the value doesn’t offer reputational buttressing? What happens in a world where luxury alone isn’t a marker of power and wealth?
Which finally takes me back to the Chanel shoes, almost. We’ve had a massive return to wealth disparity since the 1980s and Reagan. I used Madonna’s career to help us track the changes in the wealth structure that Reaganomics created in our society. To summarize that long essay, we cannot easily have another Madonna. The idea that someone with no connections could become a big star by supporting herself through part-time jobs cannot happen in today’s wealth structure.
While fashion has historically bridged the personal and public as an agent of socialization, mass consumerism has complicated this idea. As we’ve become less able to accrue wealth, we’ve been able to buy some of the markers of wealth more easily. Where Van Cleef & Arpels was largely worn by a few, like Princess Grace, now girls rushing to SEC schools wear the brand around campus. The mass consumption of luxury occurring while wealth has become concentrated in a few might have been a bait-and-switch. The early era of expensive brands expanding saw the hustle culture of the early internet. Influencers and bloggers often made a living by pushing the appearance of wealth. Fake it until you make it, a decade on, has left many people feeling exhausted and in debt, while landfills are overflowing.
The internet has further complicated how luxury can be signaled through fashion. Sociologist Susana Saulquin highlights how social networks accelerate trends, which results in diverse, protean logics of power. Where novelty might have been easy before algorithmic social media, now most content is cloned ad nauseam, creating a terrible sameness online. Being different is currency online, but it's increasingly challenging. In terms of luxury, the quality or rarity alone doesn’t make them status-making, because access feels fairly universal online.
The emptiness of this false luxury really brings home the topsy-turvy nature of consumerism. While the court used clothing to project wealth, they already possessed it. The performance made incremental changes in their position at court, but they already had their place in those rooms. 21st-century consumerism projected style without power as if to borrow against a future status change, but the system Reagan set up meant those changes are largely impossible in our society. But like a sunk cost, many people still invest in luxury culture.
Now finally, to put it all together in the almost-shoes. Historically, wealthy people used clothing to express power and status. Today’s wealthy, though, do not value thought and pick uninteresting emblems of wealth. Almost anyone with a credit card can buy luxury, so the value of a marker is already diminished. Many of the uber-wealthy got rich off this society that faux-democratized luxury. Now, conspicuous consumption alone doesn’t project power.
Chanel shoes are basically Marie Antoinette’s feathers and hair accouterments. Their function is solely to find another way to distance the wealthy from the rest of us. Their clear lack of utility is their great benefit. Many luxurious items trickle down to us normies, losing status and credentialing power along the way. Birkin was much more powerful when the majority of the world didn’t know they existed. Some of our earliest clothing was foot coverings, as protection transformed our ability to walk around. This style could not work outside very specific settings. You can’t work a day job with half a shoe or eat in a restaurant.
In being ridiculous, the Chanel shoes assert their real function—signaling status. The more they’re mimicked in public, the greater their power to the wealthy, who can use them as an entree to being on the inside. Unwearable shoes are meant to project their lifestyle as people who don’t need shoes. They need not worry—someone will clean the road and/ or their feet.
Given the cost-of-living crisis, though, this conspicuous consumption seems particularly callous. People are breaking their backs for much less money than before. Why would the rich and famous flaunt expensive useless shoes? They’re insulated from the problems. They’re going about their usual culture, living the spectacle of class and power. Now, if history i…
