Early consumer capitalism marketed indulgence as foreign and disavowable

Evidence

The twenty-first-century luxury business provided the clearest example yet of Jean Baudrillard’s famed idea of simulation. Luxury goods first arrived as actual artifacts from a rarefied lifestyle, and then their logos became symbols of those symbols. Now, as the logos were attached to T-shirts and tote bags, the globe’s status symbols were even further removed from the entire point—they were just a series of artificial stand-ins for wealth created to be artificial stand-ins for wealth with only the loosest connection to the social order. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 778 (#complicates, via linked claim)

MacManus’s alternative was an advertising of iconography. He built up his brands to be trusted, even revered. He sought not so much to persuade customers but to convert them; to create a lasting loyalty. In his hands, the Cadillac meant something, and its drivers were meant to identify with their vehicles. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 204 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Advertisers harnessed Orientalist excess tropes to legitimize American consumer indulgence — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 222; Early twentieth-century advertising moved from persuasion to brand loyalty and conversion — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 204; Luxury logos detached entirely from the goods’ original social meaning — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 778 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Luxury logos detached entirely from the goods’ original social meaning #complicates (0.78) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 778
• Early twentieth-century advertising moved from persuasion to brand loyalty and conversion #expands (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 204