Luxury logos detached entirely from the goods’ original social meaning

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretizes Baudrillard’s simulation as a three-stage degradation from actual artifact to logo to logo on mass-produced goods.
• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School’s culture-industry critique of degraded art forms, and the concept of reification in Adorno. — connects to: Early consumer capitalism marketed indulgence as foreign and disavowable
• ADDENDUM: Reflects the ‘omnivore monoculture’ theme relevant to the grooming/trees mass-production analogies of the essays; mainly supports Marx’s ‘death of the sellout’ mechanism.