Do You Want to Look like the One Percent?
Social status alone does not explain the way people dress
Everyone can recognise a classic French maid’s outfit, a rare case of a Victorian convention entering the repertoire of sexual fantasy. The costume’s origins in Britain are revealing, albeit not in the Ann Summers sense of the word.
The idea of regulating servants’ clothes seems to have come from a desire to maintain social distinctions. In the mid-19th century, mass production allowed female domestic workers, for the first time, to buy dresses that looked like the more fancy garments in their employers’ wardrobes. This led to a potential confusion of rank, much relished by satire of the time. The obvious solution was to introduce a clearly defined servant’s uniform, commonly a black dress with a white apron and cap. The erotic connotations came later, when American burlesque performers started using the costume in skits about French lady’s maids.
This story illustrates a familiar idea about fashion: it has a lot to do with status. People want to dress like their social superiors, while the latter are always trying to preserve the markers of their class.
The same logic is now being used to explain “quiet luxury,” a recent fad for elegant, understated clothing. The trend draws on a penchant for discreet dressing among the super-rich, popularised by the HBO series Succession and Gweneth Paltrow’s much-publicised appearance in court. The “quiet luxury” theme has since spread through a deluge of TikTok posts, lifestyle columns, and “low-key” beige jumpers that, as we speak, are being copied up and down the retail chain, from luxury brands to the fashion equivalent of McDonalds.
This is evidence, apparently, of our ongoing desire to copy the moneyed elite. “Why does this obsession with the wardrobes of the wealthy persist?” asks the Washington Post. “Why do we normal people, we mortals… still want to dress like the super wealthy?” demands the Guardian.
I can believe that the super wealthy want to dress like the super wealthy. In luxury design, a lot of attention is paid to signalling the quality, heritage and price of a product, including subtler distinctions that tell an insanely expensive watch or handbag apart from a merely very expensive one. This makes sense in circles that are both highly cosmopolitan and highly exclusive, open to ambitious social climbers and closed-off from everyone else. Fashion is a way for such groups to simultaneously cohere and compete, establishing enough of a common culture that distinctions within it can be meaningful.
The more discreet style behind “quiet luxury” recalls the divide between tasteful “old money” and vulgar “new money,” the principle being that people who are secure in their status don’t need to flaunt it. Except not needing to flaunt it is now the thing being flaunted. “Stealth wealth” designers like Loro Piana are the overstated kind of understated, and the people who wear them, such as Meghan Markle and Vladimir Putin, are not always famed for their lack of ambition.
But the idea that imitating the wealthy drives fashion more broadly is far too simple. It’s true that our self-presentation is influenced by notions of social and cultural prestige, and that for many people this means buying luxury products; LVMH did not become Europe’s first $500 billion company by catering to the one percent alone. But you only have to look around at what people are wearing to see that prestige comes in different forms. Consumerism encourages us to find a social identity that we can express by buying things, and so status is more defined by the ideals and mores of our immediate reference group than by material success per se.
The world of arts and media defines itself in opposition to both the business class and the poshos, yet is highly status-conscious in its own way. I used to work for a suit retailer that targeted arty types with details such as working cuff buttons and patterned linings, good ways of showing that you buy clothes for reasons of creativity and authenticity, the hefty price tag being incidental. Looking at fashion more broadly, a commodified image of African-American culture, based on music, sports and streetwear, has much more clout than the corporate elites portrayed in Succession.
Obviously our cultural bubbles are not airtight, and our prolific media consumption creates a wider audience for trends like “quiet luxury.” But if this is a trend – see also “fashion moment” and “mood” – then it’s unlikely to reveal a perennial law about the way people dress. What we have here is basically a meme, emerging from a coincidence of media events and snowballing into an online craze. The charisma of influencers and advertising, the pressure to conform, and the relentless search for novelty are much more relevant to this process than deference to the wealthy.
You can always come up with a plausible-sounding explanation for why a particular idea has suddenly become popular online, like the Bloomberg analyst saying of “quiet luxury” that “in times of anxiety, everyone wants to look and feel like they have old money.” But the aspirational images that spread in the media realm are like characters in a film. You don’t need deeper motivations, economic or otherwise, to find them compelling, especially once they’ve become the latest “mood.” Nor do you need to believe they are entirely real.
This is especially true with the super-rich, whose lifestyles have long since been reduced to entertainment, a fixture of TV shows and Instagram feeds. Like a French maid’s costume, the spectacle might stimulate desires and fantasies, but those feelings are directed at something which seems more like a charade than the product of an actual social order. In the context of mass culture, style for the wealthy is not fundamentally different to style for the streetwise, the old-fashioned, the progressive, and so on. These are all personas which can be performed as though in a game.
Maybe this is the secret power of the one percent: people don’t feel genuine resentment towards an apparent fiction. But they don’t feel genuine admiration for it either.