Money, Fashion, and the Aesthetics of Class Politics

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Fashion is freighted with meaning. So when I met Véronique Hyland, the Fashion Features Director at ELLE Magazine and author of the book Dress Code, which is about how fashion intersects with politics, gender, and class, I knew she’d be able to help me break down my complicated thoughts on money, fashion, and how our appearance plays into class and gender politics.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• The Money with Katie Show episode on the black market and “stealth wealth”

• The Money with Katie Show episode on overconsumption

• Véronique Hyland’s book, Dress Code

• “Can Labor Activists Be Style Icons?” (ELLE)

• “The Secret Shame of Wearing Brandy Melville” (The Cut)

• “What Happens When Underconsumption Becomes Just Another Trend?” (ELLE)

• “Higher income Americans drive bigger share of consumer spending” (Marketplace)

• “The Money Is In All the Wrong Places” (Defector)

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Transcript

Véronique:

We have, on the one hand, this underconsumption and people using what they have and more people sort of joining that movement every day—coupled with people who are really flaunting it. We could end up being in a landscape that not only feels very stratified, but looks like it as well.

Katie:

Almost a year ago now, we did an episode about the stealth wealth fashion trend and the black market for super-fake counterfeit handbags that seemed to accompany it. More recently, we covered conspicuous consumption and the inherent unsustainability of constantly acquiring new things with Aja Barber, and that episode was particularly popular. I have a theory about why that is. In a world where temptation is endless and the downsides of indulging seem minimal, if you’re a consumer in a high-income country, sometimes it kind of feels good to have someone else twist the knife a little bit if you’re trying to change your behavior.

 I often compare looking at images of Ghanaian beaches covered in discarded shit to that documentary that revealed the pink sludge that they use to make chicken nuggets. And I was like, yeah, nothing is going to zap your appetite for fast fashion or fast food, quite like the disgust response. And when it comes to fast fashion, there is a lot to be disgusted by.

But I wanted to revisit the topic today because of a recent personal slump that left me looking askance at my sweatpants. So I had just wrapped up a very challenging month between caring for a six month old foster dog who was firmly in his Velociraptor puppy phase, and getting a gnarly, gnarly case of the flu that left me feeling quite depressed after the physical symptoms finally lifted. We ended up having to cancel a long-awaited vacation. I fell behind at work. I felt not my best in many ways, and having existed for this entire funk phase in the same three pairs of rotating dirty sweatpants and stained t-shirts, I found myself craving for the first time in months, if not years, that aura of “in control put togetherness” that only freshly washed hair and hard pants can reliably deliver.

So I emerged from this dark cloud. I put on makeup for the first time in, I don’t know, six months. Your Honor, I wore slacks around my house. Yeah, it was like I was asking my physical form to represent or maybe more accurately to create the mental state that had alluded me for weeks on end, and that is the feeling of having my shit together. And it worked. Actually, I’m wearing makeup and have slacks on right now.

But it also created a bit of tension, because I tend to pride myself on not caring about or wasting precious thinking and reading time on superficiality, not wearing makeup, not caring whether my clothes match, not basing my inside state on how I look on the outside. It took years of deconstructing my Alabama sorority girl training to reach the point where I did not value myself first and foremost for my outward appearance. And this, I don’t know, it kind of felt like a backslide in a weird way.

You’re probably picking up on the not so subtle assumption of my inner turmoil, which is that fashion aesthetics, it’s all superficial. They have no place in a life of substance, right? There are grounds for exclusion, for hierarchy, for judgment, and those are not exactly values I think any of us are quick to claim. But here’s where we run headlong into our first obvious contradiction: It cannot be both superficial and meaningless and carry all these implications. Fashion is freighted with meaning.

So when I met Véronique Hyland, the fashion features director at ELLE Magazine and author of the book Dress Code, which is about how fashion intersects with politics, with gender, with class, I knew she might have some of these answers that I was looking for. Is it wrong to want to look like a person who has her life together? What does looking like you have your life together even mean? And is it possible in late stage capitalism to separate that idea from just, I don’t know, looking wealthy?

Welcome to The Money with Katie Show. I’m Katie, and today we are talking with Véronique about the quagmire that is money and fashion. Even if you’ve never heard of Véronique, you are certainly familiar with her work. If you’ve ever heard someone reference the color ‘millennial pink’, she’s the one who clocked then named this trendy color in the late 2010s. The soft hue that launched a thousand think pieces—you have Véronique to think for that. Dress Code was named one of the best books of the year by the New Yorker, Esquire and The Financial Times. And Véronique says, style reveals a society’s most deeply held values. She joins us today to talk about the role of aesthetics, fashion and appearances in our class politics…right after a quick break.

I always like to start with an easy question. So you wrote in Dress Code that you were an avowed Marxist in high school, and I just have to know more about this, because in high school I was a Mitt Romney shill, so you were definitely more radical than I was, and I’m curious to hear how that came about. But I think high school is kind of an appropriate place to start, because this is a time when you have talked about this is when class really begins to seep into our fashion choices. It’s when it kind of starts to influence how we relate to others, present ourselves to others. And I love this little piece of backstory because even then you say that you were reconciling your politics with your consumerist urges. So tell us more about that.

Véronique:

I should say that I was engaging with Marx on the shallowest level possible. At the time, it was very much like, oh, I’m working at the mall and I kind of feel alienated from my labor. I get this.

Katie:

I love that. Frankly, I think that’s incredible. You’re like, maybe we should own the means of production. Yeah, I should own these crop tops.

Véronique:

The stuff that radicalized me was so minor at the time, but it was kind of all seeping in gradually. And at the same time, I was really discovering fashion through magazines and then through style.com and the nascent internet. And so it was something I was really becoming interested in both as an art and as a mode of self-expression. But at the same time, I obviously feeling guilty about the waste and the consumerism inherent in that.

And complicating matters was the fact that I went to a high school that was fairly preppy and it was preppy in the sense of a lot of logos, but it was very much like Abercrombie and Fitch, the Pink Pony shirts and Lacoste polos. And so I very much was like, I’m going to create my own style with things that I thrift—and thrifting at the time did not maybe have the same cachet that it does now. But it was very much like, if you can’t beat them, don’t join them. Let me do something that’s totally in opposition to this.

It’s something that I still find myself conflicted about because it can be a very wasteful industry, it can be an exclusionary industry, and there are a lot of things that I don’t agree with. At the same time, it is something where the creativity is really exciting to me. Getting to talk to the people who create these designs is very exciting to me, so my feelings remain mixed.

Katie:

Yeah, I’m quite impressed that in high school you were that self-aware and also anti-conformist. I think I went to an all-girl Catholic school, so we did wear uniforms every day, which meant we weren’t really faced with that decision or that challenge, but I mean, I was like, oh, how many Abercrombie Polos can I layer on top of one another? I was very much interested in fitting in and dragging my mom through the dark foggy foliage of an Abercrombie store to the clearance rack in the back to be like, “This polo’s on sale. Please let me get it.”

So I just am kind of blown away by even high school you being like, yeah, I’m going to do something different. I do want to stick with this theme of, I’ll say, fashion and class or class struggle before we move on. You brought my attention in one of your pieces for ELLE to a Twitter account called a Union Drip, which basically posts these very capital C cool pictures of modern and historical labor leaders looking just very cool. You wrote, “From Chris Smalls in a Roku Studio ‘Eat the Rich’ jacket to Cesar Chavez in a short sleeved, wide lapel ‘70s shirt.” So Chris Smalls is the founder, the former president of the Amazon Labor Union.

So I ended up scrolling through this account, spending some time looking through it, and I was kind of honestly taken aback by how sexy it makes labor rights look. It’s like, man, that edge, that visually driven edge feels very critical in the attention economy that we live in when it’s hard to get people to notice things, to care about them, to identify with them. And you wrote about how not everybody thinks though that this is a good thing you say there’s a kind of resistance from many even on the left to the idea that drip and credibility can coexist.

And this was in your interview with the creator of the account who said, people look at the working class as people that can’t afford those kinds of luxuries or don’t have any style. And so it feels like that that pushback is kind of saying, well, hey, labor rights are a serious thing. There’s no room for aesthetics here.

But I don’t know, I come down on the opposite side of, I actually completely disagree. I think that you need aesthetics on your side if you want people to politically take your effort seriously. I think politics is mostly aesthetics, honestly, in this day and age. So, yeah, I’m curious what reporting on that piece, how you felt about that.

Véronique:

Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I think there is this widespread belief that any kind of visual style cheapens the message, but every movement has had an aesthetic of some kind. And when I interviewed John Elward, who’s the UPS driver who runs that account, he said when he was researching these labor activists of the past, people like Eugene Debs had great style. So something about American culture in particular, and maybe it’s our Protestant austerity, but it seems to reject this idea that beauty and style can coexist with any kind of substance, and this expectation that if you’re serious, you should be wearing sackcloth and ashes, you should be wearing a hair shirt.

So we’ve seen it with politicians really from both sides of the aisle, but particularly I think leftists and progressives get criticized for this because they’re seen as representing something serious. So AOC, people questioning the way that she dresses or presents herself saying she looks too good or too put together, and that means that she can’t be serious—but if she didn’t look put together, she would get so much ire from people as well.

And then Bernie Sanders getting criticized for wearing a Burton snow jacket, ski jacket that’s very expensive, but he wears it all the time. He’s always wearing it. He wore it to the inauguration and he also does live in Vermont, so he’s owned it for a really long time. When I tried to look it up, it’s no longer available and hasn’t been for a while. So he’s gotten a lot of cost per wear out of that jacket. I guess people criticized him saying, well, he should wear a cheaper jacket. I’ve had the reaction that speaking about what politicians are wearing and not in a, who wore it better fashion police kind of way, but just analyzing the messages that they are giving off is somehow cheapening them, especially when it comes to women particularly.

Katie:

That is something that I think is so fascinating about this conversation. I think that we might have overcorrected a little bit from the moment where it did feel like we were not talking about the substance. We only cared about the pants suit or the aesthetics of the women in power mattered far more than the men.

And therefore any conversation about what message is this person trying to communicate with this aesthetic? What is the message they’re sending us? That discussion then becomes coded as superficial, shallow, misogynistic. It does become more challenging to talk about, I guess I think of politicians and I think of people in power as brands to some extent. And every decision that they’re making is being made with intention and to further a certain message or vision or feeling that they want you to have. And so to take that completely off the table and say that it’s actually we can’t talk about that feels like we’re just missing a very rich text.

Véronique:

Absolutely. And I think you can even look at the way that people are sending one message with what they wear and doing. Another thing. I think about Kyrsten Sinema as a great example of this because I think she was at one point more on the left and then started to drift right—but her aesthetic remains that of a kind of progressive, twee, hipster, whatever you want to call it. And she had this very throwback femininity to her looks too, I think, in terms of the colors and the silhouettes. So it cloaked her message a little bit, and I think it was intentional because to look at her, I might think, oh, here’s someone who thinks exactly like me.

Katie:

And then she’s like, no, the hedge fund managers should get taxed lower. And you’re like, nevermind.

Another thing that I can really can’t help but think about honestly on this topic, and I would love your thoughts on it, is the role of aesthetics in a lot of what we see online right now within the new right trad wife movement, I’m pretty fascinated with Evie Magazine and the aestheticization of conspiracy and this idea that like, oh, you can make oppression look very luxurious and it cannot really be overstated. The extent to which these very beautiful, soft, lovely, I’m going to throw high income in there—how those visuals are doing a ton of heavy lifting to kind of obfuscate what’s actually happening behind the scenes.

Véronique:

It’s so funny that you mentioned that magazine because I completely went down a rabbit hole of being like, this looks in a lot of ways. It could be any other fashion magazine, women’s magazine, some of the stuff that they cover is pretty standard fare.

Katie:

And then you’re like, why are there so many articles about birth control being a lie and that you shouldn’t take birth control?

Véronique:

I was noticing that it felt like this term “alt”—people were using it for the alt right had kind of taken on this new meaning. Because you think of alternative culture back in the nineties and how that was kind of a rejection of the establishment and the man. And you can argue that it got pretty quickly commodified and swallowed up by corporations, but it did mean something at the time, and it had a style grunge that went with it that felt like it was a very rebellious style that went along with the music and the culture.

And this time around I was like, well, we’re seeing alt applied to this much more regressive movement. And at the time, I remember men in that space were dressing in this sort of dandyish throwback way, almost like a Roger Stone, but there were a lot of them doing it younger people too. And it was very much like, oh, this old school men’s wear and dressing like a gentleman or whatever.

And now we’re somehow we’re eight years on from that and the aesthetics are all over the place. Sam Cedar just did this series of conversations with young people on the right, and one of the reactions was how much they looked like hipsters. People were like, they look like my barista. They look like a cool person in Bushwick. It’s a sort of thing where if I were just to look at this person, I would not necessarily guess that this was their political affiliation.

And then as I wrote about in my book, you have also this muddling of the wife aesthetic where both progressive and trad women are wearing these milkmaid dresses and these kind of throwback looks or the raw milkmaid dresses that Evie Magazine was selling. And I think that’s partly just about how everything has merged aesthetically. But then I also think that people who idolize the trad wife influencers or they’re into drinking raw milk, they see it as they’re living an alternative lifestyle, even though it’s about the most traditional lifestyle you can have because you’re going back to a time before pasteurization.

But there’s this strange sense of nostalgia and regression, this idea that things were better than this mythic then, but it’s mixed with this conviction that you’re rebelling against something which is weird to see—because it’s like your candidate won, RFK Jr. is in office, it works for you, but there’s still this anger and this sense of rebellion. And I think in the same way that we saw people in the sixties doing back to the land and communes and they were coming at it from a very left-wing perspective, but there’s this sense of we are living this alternative lifestyle, but it’s like a retreat rather than moving forward.

Katie:

I do think that there is always going to be something very intoxicating. And to your point about cachet, I think identifying with the rebellion or with someone who is being radical and a free thinker, it’s you against the world, it’s you against the man.

But we had a guest on the show a week ago, Kathryn Edwards, an economist, who was pointing out that this, I’m keying in on the words you used—anger, that this anger I think is very economic in nature. And I think that’s the interesting bridge that I want to draw here is how do our feelings about our material reality about the economic system we exist within the structures we exist within the hand that we feel we’ve been dealt. How does that then kind of bleed into the way that we present ourselves, the groups that we identify with, the way that we signal that belonging to those other people and the way that we dress?

It’s very fascinating. There is a more flagrant, open secret variety of this fashion as a political statement that I wanted to get into. You’ve done some interesting reporting on Brandy Melville, and I am kind of obsessed with its connection to libertarianism. It’s fascinating that you would have this brand that’s making cheap tube tops for teenagers that also has this weird, it’s associating itself with an economic system or with an economic set of beliefs. There is a New York Magazine reporting from 2019 that talks about the brand’s bizarre fascination with Ayn Rand, who was an early 20th century novelist whose work was very influential for libertarians and conservatives. You almost certainly know more about this than I do, but I was reading that early on, they sold copies of Rand’s books and publications from the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute in their stores. And I was just like, what? There’s so much going on there. It feels very loaded to me.

Véronique:

Yeah, I mean they really doubled down on this because they had a sister brand at one point named John Galt, who was the main character of Ayn Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged, and then they also put a misattributed Ayn Rand quote on a t-shirt at one point. So there does seem to be a fixation. I don’t know why they specifically sold the books. I haven’t been able to get to the bottom of that, but I definitely think that you could see that ethos in the fact that it is one size fits most and that size is very small.

And I think just zooming out from that particular situation, things have been moving in this direction where we’ve been seeing less and less body diversity on the runways and in fashion campaigns after making much more progress with it over the last decade. And some of that can definitely be chalked up to Ozempic culture, but I think there’s also this real sense of going back to these regressive body ideals along with other regressive beliefs, and that coincides with capitalism. People feeling like they have to look out for number one and looking a certain way as the only way to get ahead and looking a certain way is the ultimate status symbol beyond just anything you can buy.

Katie:

Yeah, it’s interesting because the kind of obvious connection that I want to draw here parallel is when you’re selling fashion, you are selling an ideology, certain aesthetics, you are buying into an ideology, and this is such a great literal manifestation of, and we are also literally selling you the ideology in the novel. This is a worldview that emphasizes individual freedom, personal choice, that these are the paths to liberation.

And I just find that worldview when paired with a brand known for producing only extra small clothing that is worn almost exclusively by upper income white teenage girls, the association of those body types and that group of people with that particular aesthetic, it feels very intentional. It feels meaningful, but it’s a little bit like, okay, yeah, I guess that makes sense.

Véronique:

It really is this idea of you’re creating this atmosphere where everyone kind of looks the same and it’s this one very specific aesthetic. And it’s the antithesis of a lot of the brands that we saw that prioritized representation, prioritized diversity, and these direct consumer brands that launched in the 2010s, which I wrote about extensively in the book, but that came weighted with their own political beliefs and associations of, oh, you’re going to make the world better by buying this.

So I think that there may be a little bit of a backlash to that. Both of these things have coexisted and been in parallel for a while, but I think the fact that we’re seeing more of just one body type, one look, one age even, and a lot of the imagery is notable and frankly freaks me out a bit of course.

Katie:

And why does it freak you out?

Véronique:

It’s just this idea of these gains being erased. And I don’t want to oversell it. I mean, I was covering modeling a lot at that time and sort of all the things that were going on with plus size modeling and diversity in the modeling industry and who can be a model. A lot of the companies that have, let’s say, a diverse group of models in their campaign might not have a diverse group of people on their board or working there, or they might be exploiting people. But so I think that it is a limited sphere, and I don’t want to give people too much credit for changing the world or something.

But it did feel like things were moving in a certain direction. And then to see that correction has been a little scary and to also see that so many people are okay with it. So you sort of wonder you’re just faking the other opinion when you thought it was great before, I don’t know. But it has been a noticeable correction.

Katie:

We will be right back with Veronique after a quick break.

Hierarchy and exclusion—those two things make for a great marketing strategy. It’s good for business to be exclusive. It’s good for business to reinforce to people that we’re actually not for everybody. We’re only for the best people and you are the best people, so you should give us your money. It doesn’t totally surprise me that an industry like fashion or beauty who maybe as you’ve highlighted, and I think Jessica Defino has done excellent work on highlighting this in the skincare and makeup spaces that even when they were nominally pro aging or nominally accepting of women who had wrinkles, you would still click through to the product page and it would be like erases fine lines and wrinkles. So it wasn’t like we were actually changing the underlying values, but the aesthetic shift or the superficial change of course is noteworthy I think and reflective of the moment that we’re in.

But all of this talk about exclusion and the power of marketing and how you make somebody psychologically inclined to give you their money in exchange for your product and for them to really feel good about that. It kind of runs up against what we say are our cultural values as a democracy. This is a very undemocratic way of organizing or outfitting a society. You write in a piece that mass produced clothing was a public relations campaign at one time for democracy in the early days of the United States. That mass production of clothing was kind of a way that we were flexing our democracy on people. So how was that the case?

Véronique:

Well, I think for a long time it was the opposite. People prided themselves on this idea of home-spun clothing and even felt like it tied in with these American values of independence and frugality, but then along came mass production and that enabled people to more easily copy the higher echelons of society and what they wore, which people have always done. They copied what royals wore and they copied what lords and ladies wore. But this really enabled people to have the patterns or have mass produced items and they could get the look in a sense.

And then we get into more recent history when there were so many high-low collaborations that stated that their aim was to democratize fashion, which is interesting, because how do you democratize something that you buy and that not everyone can buy? But does that really have anything to do with democracy? But yeah, I mean as soon as something becomes accessible to the masses, that upper level of fashion consumers wants to move away from it because the scarcity is part of the allure.

It’s marketing 101, this is limited edition, you can only get this one drop and then it’s going to go away. This popup only lasts for two weeks. I think that it’s not even necessarily about price or quality. Something could be a drugstore product that suddenly goes viral on TikTok and it’s really hard to get, and it’s selling out of every CVS, and that could become the next thing that everyone’s going wild for. So it really is just about this idea of this is limited, not everyone can get it, and that is part of the marketing plan beyond what the item actually is or if you need it.

Katie:

In that case, it does kind of feel like we’re always going to be running up into that tension if we’re asking something like fashion or something that relies on marketing to further goals of inclusivity because these things are just so diametrically opposed.

Véronique:

And I think a lot of this talk about whether it was democratizing fashion because you can buy this luxury brand at this mass store or whether it’s the world is getting better because we have this diverse campaign with a whole group of people. I’m not saying that those mean nothing or that those weren’t important, but that is not a substitute for social change. It’s not going to solve income inequality. It’s not going to solve a lot of equity issues. When I was covering it, I tried not to overly buy into this or into this optimism, but I think I did a little bit because it was exciting to see what I thought of as, oh, this progress that’s happening and things are, the arc of history is bending towards justice and all of that. And so that’s why it’s been a little bit jarring just to see how quickly things feels like things have changed.

Katie:

There are two sides of that coin that I constantly feel like I flip back and forth on because I share that sense of, I think I have a sense of corporate cynicism when a corporation is like, “We are on your side, girlboss, look, we allowed someone who’s not a size zero to be pictured in our product.” I’m like, cool, okay, thanks. It’s very hard for me to take it as meaningful.

And yet at the same time, I do believe that there is value in that in shaping culture. How could we not think that these things shape culture so superficial or not, these changes, they do matter and they did matter. And the fact that the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction, I think it does signal something. I guess I do hold out hope a little bit that I think these things do come in waves and cycles, and I think that progress can sometimes be a two steps forward, one step back ordeal.

Véronique:

I think of people who were, what is that song where it’s like, “I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac,” which now feels like, oh yeah, those are probably on Teslas. That idea of the sixties and seventies radicalism ebbing away and what people were seeing in the eighties, and I see so many parallels between the eighties and now, and they’re really being reflected in fashion too. I’m fascinated with this.

Katie:

How so?

Véronique:

This time period of the Nouvelle Society, which was a lot of these socialites and people who were women who were married to men in finance, Wall Street traders and things like that, and they wore a lot of—Christian LaCroix would be a big designer that they were associated with—where it was these very voluminous dresses that had wide skirts and beautiful ruffled sleeves and petty coats, and it was this very extreme femininity that we were seeing. And then we’ve also seen that kind of American Psycho Patrick Bateman look of the sort of corporate raider on the runways as well. It’s just interesting to see both sides of that coming back. And I guess there is a reboot of the movie happening.

Katie:

When you say that about the ‘80s, it does remind me of that felt like a thread in the New York cover story about the cruel kids table and the aesthetics at that party and how it felt like they kind of thought of themselves as channeling this “‘80s Bret Easton Ellis rich kid, rebel without a cause, can’t be bothered” vibe.

Véronique:

No, absolutely. But it was like there was something kind of visually off about it. I think that’s a little sinister. People remarked on the photographer was using a lot of flash, so that didn’t help, but I meanit was like they were sort of doing an eighties themed party or something, but they weren’t quite nailing it kind of the way the people who didn’t live through an era. I always say to the younger kids in my office, people in the Y2K era, we didn’t wear clothes made out of CDs. Most people dressed pretty normally. But yes, I agree with you. I definitely saw it in that and the aesthetics of that, even the sort of gowns and the blazers and all of that was really noticeable.

Katie:

Yeah, it’s interesting to be channeling the ‘80s so intentionally, I felt like when I did the cover shoot for my book, I had all these images from the ‘70s. I was like, I want to channel an era from when women’s rights were ascendant and people cared and there was actual organizing, and people thought that women deserved rights. That was the aesthetic callback that I wanted to be making.

And I don’t think I even realized at the time the role that fashion was playing in my memory, in the way that I think about that era and picture it and the way that I was like, well, obviously the hair and the clothes, there were things that I was trying to channel to convey that spirit or to channel that spirit. It’s funny, the fact that an era, the ‘80s was in some ways a reaction to the civil rights and women’s rights movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s. That feels also in some ways we’re living through kind of an accelerated version of that now.

Véronique:

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, the ‘70s references you were talking about Ms Magazine and things like that, where that was starting to really break through in the mainstream, and that was considered cool, and then you sort of had this weird, then you went straight into working girl.

Katie:

That’s so interesting. So another recent fashion world trend that has been very popular that you wrote about is this idea of underconsumption. You had covered it as like, hey, sustainability is something that you do not, something that you buy. And that line really resonated with me. I was like, yeah, how classic for us to interpret that. It’s like, oh yeah, sustainability is a niche brand type that I should be looking for.

I have an Urban Outfitter sweater that I bought in 2013. I don’t think it would check a single box for the way that we think about what it means to be sustainably produced now if we were to hold it up to the standards of how we think about that term today. But I do think the fact that I’m still wearing it almost every week, 12 years later, has to count for something that in itself is sustainable.

And in your recent coverage of underconsumption, you grapple with this larger question of whether this is a trend. What does it mean if we’re thinking about this like a trend as opposed to maybe a more permanent shift? And I read that piece the same day that I had seen some research from Moody’s that showed that households with a top 10% income, so an income of over $250,000 now account for almost half of all consumer spending. And so I was like, huh. Well, I mean if that continues in that direction, which I think we have every reason to believe it will, considering that the last 40 years or so of income inequality trends have demonstrated our reluctance to do anything about that, it does lead me to the question of is under consumption going to become the default for 90% of people simply by default and maybe, I don’t know, more relevantly. Well, how relevant are those 90% of people under consuming anyway if the top 10% are responsible for more and more of the consumption every year?

Véronique:

Absolutely. Well, first I was going to say right before this, I was reading a Wall Street Journal article, and then I checked the homepage. I was like, before I do this interview about the economy for a finance podcast, I should make sure we still have an economy.

And I mean, I really don’t know. I certainly can’t predict what is going to happen, but I do think that once I realized that a relatively small group of people are the ones funneling most of the cash into our economy, things started to make a lot more sense because I felt like I am not seeing these gains in most people’s lives, including my own, nor do I know that many people who are spending huge amounts of money. And most of the people that I know are much more modest with their consumption, seeing underconsumption be covered has been interesting because some people were calling it underconsumption core, almost like you would any other trend that has core on it. So it felt like, well, is this just going to be the new thing?

And then you move on to is it we’re back to overconsumption? It felt weird to see it covered as a trend. And that’s why I wanted to write that story because I wanted to look at both the good and bad aspects of it being talked about and it being sort of trendy.

But yeah, I mean, it’s something that I’ve been doing my whole life and I think many people have been doing their whole lives. For that story, I spoke to Aja Barber, who I know you’ve had on the show, and she said, this is called living a normal life. This is something people have been practicing for generations. So I think that’s really important to remember that for a lot of people, this isn’t a trend. It’s something that they’ve always done. And then I also think this is something that people are often doing by necessity that gets covered as a trend.

It reminds me of when shopping your closet was being so talked about around the time of the 2008 recession, like, oh, just go back and shop your closet. And it felt like that was sort of cooked up a little bit because it’s like, well, people are doing this anyway, so we might as well sort of retcon it into being a trend and into being a lifestyle choice. But yeah, I could definitely see it becoming the default for more people depending on what happens with the economy in the near future. But what’s also interesting is that fashion month just ended the other day.

Katie:

Oh, good to know.

Véronique:

And that’s the four major fashion makes that take place in New York, London, Milan, and Paris twice a year. And when those conclude, everyone kind of gets together and we’ve been going to the shows looking at photos, and then we kind of pull everything into these trends meetings, and we’re talking about what we’re seeing that’s overarching across all the shows. And runway fashion is leaning so much into maximalism. Look at me, there’s lots of fur, there’s lots of big broaches and pearls and things like that.

And I remember that back around the 2008 crash, people who were wealthy were very modest about it, and there was almost some shame. There were stories of people carrying their luxury purchases out of the store in unmarked paper bags—

Katie:

Meaning after the crash?

Véronique:

Yes.

Katie:

Okay, we’ve gone over the cliff and now we’re like, oh, shit. Well, I’m still rich. So how am I going to hide my wealth from people?

Véronique:

I don’t think it was necessarily considered cool to be rich, perhaps other than in the way that it’s always sort of considered culturally rich. And we saw something called stealth wealth really begin to crest, which was these very pared back—you think of The Row as being an example of that where ‘if you know you know’—it’s high quality, but it can look very simple and it’s not announcing itself. It’s not like you have a ton of logos or a brand name or anything like that on it.

So the difference to me is that we have, on the one hand, this underconsumption and people using what they have and more people sort of joining that movement every day—coupled with people who are really flaunting it. So what I’m thinking is we could end up being in a landscape that not only feels very stratified, but looks like it as well.

Katie:

Oh, fascinating.

Véronique:

And thinking about the ‘80s, I can’t tell you for sure I wasn’t around for much of it, but it wasn’t like you were seeing, maybe you were seeing people in Nouvelle Society gowns at the really, really high end, but I don’t think it was the kind of thing where, I mean, there was good quality clothing available at the mall. You could look fairly put together. And so I don’t think that there was as much of this visual stratification as we’re seeing now, and even in all of these discussions about trends as a generational thing.

Oh, you don’t want to wear skinny jeans because then people will know that you’re a millennial is probably my favorite. And then skinny jeans are coming back as I suspected they might just because people were so anti them for so long. But why is that not okay? Why do you have to completely change your style every season and why do you have to pretend to not be part of a generation? You’re a part of all of these things. So this idea that you just have to go out and get a new wardrobe to fit this new archetype, even if they can afford it, I think people are somewhat rebelling against that.

Katie:

I love that line that Aja said about this is just called living a normal life. It was just like a normal pre-social media level of consumption or pre fast fashion level of consumption, But similar to kind of the aestheticization of labor organizing as a cool and rebellious thing to do. I feel similar about the underconsumption thing. I’m like, I don’t know if it’s the worst thing in the world, if this is becoming more fashionable, I hope it stays that way.

I think I maybe share the, well, we’ll see the acceleration of these cycles on social media is almost weekly at this point. But I want to go a little bit deeper on this stealth wealth thing because the parallels that you’re drawing to the 2008 crash are very notable to me. We did an episode a couple of years ago about quiet luxury, the old money trends, and how it’s weird that it’s never been less cool to be part of the 1%, and yet the public seems very enamored with dressing like them.

You wrote a piece about it with this great lede; you wrote, “This summer, it seems everyone wants to be rich.” I would love to hear you expound a little bit on what it means to you to see that stealth wealth or old money trend reemerging in this particular moment. Because at the time I was like, well, maybe this is literally just Shiv Roy-induced, we’re very Succession-focused right now, and that was such a cultural moment where everyone was watching this show. So I was like, I could totally see it just being that.

But it does feel like it has outlasted that. And I think the fact that you brought this to my attention that stealth wealth as a fashion identity is actually a great recession vestige. I was like, oh, maybe this is actually, maybe there’s something a little bit deeper going on here. So curious if you have any other thoughts on that about the visual stratification.

Véronique:

I definitely do. Oh, hit me. So yeah, that story was called “Do We Want to Eat the Rich or Dress like Them?”, which I have to give myself a pat on the back for that headline. It’s probably my favorite headline I’ve done.

Katie:

It’s pretty good.

Véronique:

But yeah, we were seeing so many people cheering on the orcas that were sinking yachts.

Katie:

Oh yeah.

Véronique:

If you remember that. And then some of the same people were consuming so much content or creating content about how to look old money, quiet, luxury, coastal grandma, even how to look like you are on vacation in Europe, but you’re actually home. And these are all obviously categories that are heavily weighted with class association. They represent stability. Even something like Coastal Grandma, it’s like, well, you were able to afford to have kids and your kids were able to afford to have kids, and you live in a nice coastal property.

But yeah, I think there’s this longing for the establishment in a time where our trust in institutions has probably never been lower. And I think that goes across the political spectrum. So it’s interesting that people are kind of clinging to this. And I think a lot of, and this is someone who I creatively admire, but politically probably disagree with a lot, Bret Easton Ellis, who came up before, he said certain things are empire and certain things are not empire. The way that the Hollywood studio system was empire, the corporate office is probably an example of empire. And then he looked at things that were post empire, like a disruptive tech company or what have you.

All of that may have now moved into the category of empire, but I think people are really nostalgic for those things. I wrote this story recently about the awards show style on the red carpet, which is not something that I am usually that into. I’m like the rare person in fashion who isn’t that into the red carpet. But I had been noticing all of these people either wearing recreations of gowns from the ‘50s or actual vintage pieces, but even their hair and makeup and their styling and everything that they were wearing was very old Hollywood. And I thought that was interesting because we’re hearing so much more about how hard it is to get a movie financed.

Sean Baker talked about that a lot on the award circuit. Brady Corbet said, I’ve made $0 from the Brutalist, which is one of the most critically acclaimed movies of the year. And even actors are gig workers like Sydney Sweeney talked about this and she got a lot of smoke for it. But I think it’s true that even those jobs that we once associated with so much glamour, they’ve still got to find ways to pay the bills. And those things are increasingly not movies. So people seem to really be going back to this idea of, I want to look like an old Hollywood starlet. I want to kind of cosplay like I’m in this former world. Don’t get me wrong. Some of it was really beautiful and I’m interested in fashion history, so I enjoyed looking at it, but the implications of it were definitely weird, especially since it was all women in their twenties and thirties and they were really styled to look like someone from a much older era.

But I think that people still kind of clinging to that glamor because we haven’t really found a visual alternative. One of the questions that I got a lot when I was promoting the book, because it talks about the new look, the new look is, what’s the new look for the 2020s? What’s the equivalent of some new silhouette or some new idea? And we don’t really have that. I mean, maybe you could say that 10 years ago it was like athleisure, which I know sounds silly, but the presence of athleisure, the presence of streetwear, all of these things becoming more high fashion.

But there hasn’t really been this forward looking thing in fashion except for some very avantgarde designers in a while. Everything is pretty steeped in nostalgia. And in the ‘60s, we had these designers who were doing maybe kind of goofy at times, but visions of the space, age and plastics before we knew as much about plastics, but there was this sense of, oh, we’re designing for the future and now so much stuff feels like it’s very reheated nostalgia, which is interesting.

Katie:

Oh my goodness. So there are a couple of things coming to mind for me. The first is we are going to link this in the show notes. Kelsey McKinney wrote a great piece for Defector about the Sydney Sweeney debacle and links this very nicely kind of the economic precarity that’s touching even those who we would consider to be the most, the people that we would consider to be the most untouchable and privileged and lucky in society are not immune to this.

And that’s why I think the tech thing is interesting because I’ve kind of been going down this rabbit hole recently of this techno feudalist idea of we live in this techno-dystopian world, but the idea that the nostalgia is doing so much heavy lifting, I mean, that’s politically, that’s economically, that’s aesthetically. It’s like we can’t imagine something better. We have lost our ability to imagine the better future and what it could look like.

I think that that’s so, so fascinating, and it really connects to this idea that you wrote that kind of stopped me in my tracks. You’re talking about “champagne socialism”, this demand that life’s little luxuries should be equally distributed, but that this quiet luxury trend is born of the sense that we really actually can’t even imagine having access to nice things without being rich. These things feel synonymous to us, does not occur to us that there is a version of society. We cannot imagine this version of society in which nice things are just accessible to everyone.

But that’s where I kind of started looping around this central question that I feel like we’ve come back to a couple times now, which is fashion’s role and the role of aesthetics in communicating status, or that the idea that something is nice is very synonymous with the idea that others are excluded from possessing it. Maybe that actually demonstrates my own lack of imagination around this, but I do feel like these ideas are very connected, that we are only capable of thinking about a better world by A) looking backward, and B) if we are thinking about ourselves as having nice things, well, obviously I’m super rich then because only super rich people have nice things have access.

Véronique:

Right, I mean, there’s this whole idea of the treat economy, which is people buying these little luxuries. Post 9/11, I think the chairman of Estee Lauder talked about the lipstick effect that women were buying these little pick me ups. And so maybe if it was a designer brand lipstick, that was their way of having a little piece of the dream that we see on the runway. And now we’ve seen it with bag charms are very popular, or the sunglasses, the logo t-shirt, or what have you. People are buying those relatively less expensive things as a way to feel like they’re a part of it.

But I think, like I was saying, things are headed in this more stratified direction where I think that’s going to be less and less accessible to the masses. And I think people are sort of like, I’ve definitely said this to myself. I’m not ever going to be able to buy a house, but I can get this latte. I think it’s sort of the opposite of the personal finance advice that was a cliche for so long that you and others have really debunked. But this idea of, oh, millennials can’t afford homes because they’re buying too many lattes or too much avocado toast. And I think now people are like, well, if I’m going to suffer in this way, might as well have a nice beverage.

But I do think that that is cracking a little bit, that if we get to the point where people can’t even justify those treats, that’s sort of an interesting place for fashion in general because fashion is selling that dream or that entry to the dream.

Katie:

That to me, that moment when the little treats go away, it kind of calls to mind to, I guess end this conversation where we started it—I saw a TikTok the other day that was like, the problem was that Karl Marx didn’t foresee a world in which the poor could have ice cream. And it was this point about how basically that was the reason that we have not reached revolution is because the little treats, the ice cream, the metaphoric ice cream has been so available, and capitalism has made all these little trinkets so available that people are kind of anesthetized into not even pursuing something that would approach fairness because it’s like, oh, well, I’m good. I got my ice cream. I’ll be okay. I got my little beverage or my little lipstick.

It does beg the question that, okay, well, if it gets to the point where even the little treats are not as accessible or they maybe just lose their luster for some reason, I don’t know if that will happen, but if it did, I do think we’d be facing maybe a different and less apathetic environment we’ll say.

Véronique, thank you so much for joining us.

Véronique:

Thank you for having me.

Katie:

I guess I don’t know where I’ve totally landed even after this conversation on what my personal style says about me or what I wanted to say, what I wanted to communicate. But I was reading something over the weekend. It was an older piece of Jessica Defino’s. It was kind of a critique of the movie Poor Things. And in it, she is talking about the framing of the makeup choices on the press tour of that movie, because in the movie, the main character Bella Baxter played by Emma Stone doesn’t wear any makeup. And it’s part of the message of the movie that this woman, unencumbered by social norms, kind of finds the whole idea of covering your face ridiculous. And Define writes, quote, “It’s meant to earn attraction, attention and money,” referring to the decision to wear makeup or dress a certain way. And in a footnote for that phrase, she says, “These are perfectly acceptable reasons to wear makeup, but that the insistence that it is something else, a natural, transparent show of comfort in one skin that perpetuates the idea that attraction, attention and money are not acceptable reasons to wear it.”

And I thought that that was a worthwhile way to think about these choices, that there is some value and honesty around what we are trying to attain or communicate. I also liked this quote from a feminist philosopher named Kate Manne, which I think really captured this messiness. She wrote a piece about this idea of needing purity in your life, a politics of purity that every personal choice you make should align with your political views. She wrote, “My life, like most of our lives, is a long list of compromises and battles and hopefully thoughtful attempts to balance competing values, freedom, moral commitment, and sometimes simple expediency.” I am not above being impure and pragmatic, and I guess that is how I am going to justify the fact that when I need to feel like I can get stuff done and be on top of it, I put mascara on.

And that is all for this week. We’ll see you next week right here on The Money with Katie Show. Our show is the production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew Content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.