Conglomerate economics made status symbols accessible to everyone permanently

Evidence

Despite such temporary stumbles, the conglomerates’ entire financial existence depended on making status symbols accessible to everyone, and there was no going back to being small-scale, artisanal companies for a select clientele. They also couldn’t return to exclusively outfitting the wealthy in formal clothing, as the world’s elite had lost interest in decorum. When Silicon Valley finally decided to dress up, the tech elite also flocked to streetwear. At age forty, Mark Zuckerberg abandoned his dull gray hoodies and T-shirts for “the imperialist phase of his glow-up”: trendy “broccoli perm” hair, a single thin gold chain, and exclusive T-shirts made with LA designer Mike Amiri with the Latin phrase “aut Zuck, aut nihil” (a reference to the expression “either a Caesar or nothing”). He teased that a “limited drop” of this gear was in the works. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 775

Categorization

• CANDY: Zuckerberg’s ‘aut Zuck, aut nihil’ T-shirt and ‘imperialist glow-up’ phase is a fun, self-contained anecdote.
• XREF: The tech elite adopting streetwear shows the directionless ‘omnivore monoculture’ — everyone consuming everything, nothing signaling anything. — connects to: Consumer credit and mass prosperity enable widespread symbolic status counterfeiting. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 232