Flaunting wealth stopped being socially disqualifying as status came to demand self-branding

Evidence

Millennials’ unapologetic fascination with wealth reflected a broader cultural shift. Flaunting money was once seen as gauche, but gaucheness itself was no longer socially disqualifying. In a high-pressure, winner-takes-all economy, the most successful millennials displayed their status by living and dressing like children and by outsourcing adult responsibility to focus entirely on self-optimization. The path to the top of the status ladder required neither rebellion nor tasteful detachment but a relentless and open commitment to refining one’s personal brand. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 354

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article — where sumptuary norms once policed display, here the prohibition itself has dissolved; gaucheness as a category has died, mirroring how his era’s moral panics over dress were also about class signaling.
• SHARE: The ‘living and dressing like children to signal status’ inversion is a genuinely surprising observation worth sending to the reader’s friend who works in brand/status marketing.