1980s consumer aestheticism was driven by the new middle class’s material prosperity

Evidence

What is striking about the philosophical drift towards Aestheticism is how well it accords with the cultural mood of the 1980s. It has become a truism is to say that this was a decade obsessed with style. Theorists of post-Fordism were right to note a certain differentiation of markets and the proliferation of designer brands crucial to whose appeal was the suggestion that in buying, say, Levi 501s one was gaining access to a certain lifestyle, although they greatly exaggerated the scale of these developments. In various aspects of life one could detect a similar association of certain kinds of consumption with forming oneself into a particular kind of person; among the most important was a narcissistic obsession with the body, both male and female, less as an object of desire than — when disciplined by diet and exercise into a certain shape - as an index of youth, health, energy, mobility. This stylization of existence (to borrow Foucault’s phrase) is surely best understood against the background, not of New Times, but of good times for the new middle class, a class which found itself in the 1980s with more money in its pocket and easier access to credit, without the pressure to save to which the old petty bourgeoisie was subject. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 619

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s theme? Not really — but the materialist account of a supposedly cultural/aesthetic shift echoes the article-framing instinct of grounding cultural phenomena in infrastructure/economics. More precisely, this is a counterargument to Jameson’s postmodernism thesis (stylistic/aesthetic shifts as superstructural expression of late capitalism).
• XREF: This reverses the causal direction Jameson posits — for Jameson, late capitalism produces the aesthetic; here the new middle class’s prosperity produces it as an expression of class position, not of a new economic epoch. Links directly to the anti-Jameson project of the whole book. — connects to: A rising middle class multiplied the appropriation of others’ dress styles.; Postwar affluence shifted class structures from embedded tiers to consumption-based forms; When lower tiers afford higher-status goods, everyone’s baseline consumption norms rise. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 161

Broader Connections

• A rising middle class multiplied the appropriation of others’ dress styles. #corroborates (0.80)
• Postwar affluence shifted class structures from embedded tiers to consumption-based forms #corroborates (0.72)