Consumer credit and mass prosperity enable widespread symbolic status counterfeiting.

Evidence

In a feudal world of rigid castes and sweeping poverty, there were insurmountable limits on the degree to which the low-born could pretend to be high-born. Today relative prosperity and easy access to consumer credit enables middle-class individuals to stretch their salaries toward the purchase of onetime upper-class status symbols, such as designer handbags and European sports cars. Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of the LVMH luxury conglomerate, would not be one of the world’s wealthiest people if the company stuck to selling Louis Vuitton trunks and Moët & Chandon champagne only to the top 1 percent. LVMH invested in the DFS network of duty-free stores in airports and shopping malls around the world, which make luxury goods more accessible and affordable. A significant portion of the modern economy is based on committing light symbolic deceit. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 232

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: luxury conglomerates structurally depend on ‘light symbolic deceit’ — how brands market attainable status.
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the dress-codes/immodesty moral-panic essay: the democratization of formerly elite symbols via consumer credit is the modern form of the appropriation the middle class began in industrial cities.
• XREF: connects to: High reputation stakes create strong incentives to counterfeit protection credentials. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 116; Illegitimate claims to status provoke envy and social sanction — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 92; Anyone can counterfeit status symbols because signification inherently permits lying. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 231 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Anyone can counterfeit status symbols because signification inherently permits lying. #corroborates (0.85) — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 231
• Conglomerate economics made status symbols accessible to everyone permanently #expands (0.80) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 775
• High reputation stakes create strong incentives to counterfeit protection credentials. #expands (0.78) — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 116
• Illegitimate claims to status provoke envy and social sanction #qualifies (0.75) — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 92
• Counter-symbolism can reclaim narrative space from corporate propaganda #responds-to (0.72) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1661