1. Status is a form of social power that relies on symbols.
2. It’s the recognition of a person’s prestige and influence.
3. So people use certain objects or actions to send these signals.
4. Sociologist Thorstein Veblen called this ‘conspicuous consumption’.
5. The deliberate act of buying or showing off lavishness to prove wealth.
6. Such purchases are made for ostentatious displays, not practical use.
7. Classic examples are luxury cars, fancy handbags and oversized mansions.
8. For centuries, wealth was proven by things that were visible and obvious.
9. But over time, the middle class learned to mimic and copy these symbols.
10. Credit, counterfeits and aspirational brands made luxury accessible to all.
11. So a Rolex on your wrist or a Louis Vuitton bag no longer guarantees status.
12. This change pushed the wealthy towards signals only insiders would notice.
13. Wharton’s Jonah Berger and Morgan Ward call it ‘inconspicuous consumption’.
14. Trends like ‘quiet luxury’ and ‘stealth wealth’ emerged with understated signalling.
15. Examples include beige palettes, special stitches, extra buttons and hidden labels.
16. But as demand grew and imitation followed, subtle markers became mainstream.
17. It created class tourism, where you too can live out a logo-free, aspirational lifestyle.
18. Exclusive status signalling needed to change again as rich cues lost their uniqueness.
19. They found a counterintuitive answer: bad taste; costly as it’s embarrassing to copy.
20. Kim Kardashian’s $750k gold toilets are too ridiculous to be acceptable or copied.
21. Jeff Koons’s designer yacht is so hideous it’s not just repulsive but visual pollution.
22. Jeff Bezos’s Venetian wedding is so gaudy and excessive it’s hated by almost everyone.
23. This is signalling at its extreme: spending deliberately to appear worse than taste permits.
24. So the ugliness itself is a barrier; keeping the signal exclusive and undesirable to imitate.
25. Writer Nathalie Olah says the wealthy are free to live like pigs and taste is for the rest of us.
26. So good taste is a burden of the aspirational class, whereas bad taste is a privilege of the rich.
27. If quiet luxury hides the rich from the many, bad taste makes them visible yet repulsive to copy.
28. This is why you can't really tell who's rich anymore, unless they're tasteless enough to show you.