Needing the unnecessary: the democratization of luxury

With increasing affluence this view shifted. Luxury became dangerous not because of debasement but because it was a sign of overreaching, of getting out of place. An interesting transformation shows how fluid this category can be. In the Renaissance, luxury objects became those things thought worthy of being painted. Such objects were called objets d'art. Now, of course, the luxury object is the painting itself. But you can see that even before the industrial revolution there was a growing desire to show stuff off, to use the material world as marker of social dominance, to strut, to flaunt.

By the 18th century, social critics like Bernard Mandeville and economists like Adam Smith were beginning to suggest that, for improving the weal of humanity, the promise of consuming luxury might be a better carrot than the stick of shame. Yet there was still deep resentment for consuming out of your class, beyond your means.

This suspicion about consuming beyond your class continued well into the 19th century. In fact, ancient sumptuary laws, explaining exactly what objects were forbidden by church and state, were read from the Anglican pulpit until the 1860s. Reading these laws took two hours of church time to complete, and the laws kept people in their places, if only to have to listen to them.

Clerics, clearly supported by the aristocracy, were not alone in stiff-arming luxury. With the onset of industrial surpluses, secular pundits like Henry David Thoreau railed against what they took to be the excesses of mass production. "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts, of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind," he pointed out in Walden.

By thefin de siecle this view of high-end consumption had so exploded that Thorstein Veblen unloosed the first modern sustained attack on luxury in his thoroughly entertaining Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Coining all manner of nifty concepts like conspicuous consumption, invidious comparison, bandwagon effect, symbolic pantomime, vicarious leisure, and parodic display, Veblen had at the excesses of robber-baron shopping.

The Leisure Classic

In fact, one might say that Veblen enjoyed it rather too much and succeeded only too well. When he formulated his theory of the leisure class at the turn of the century, ostentation in dress was at its full plumage, not least because new money was desperate to prove that it had made it to high society. Veblen's argument was so simple that it cut like Occam's razor. It has proved so powerful that it has achieved the status of unquestioned truism.

Here is Veblen's argument: Aswealth spreads, what drives consumers' behavior is increasingly neither subsistence nor comfort but the attainment of "the esteem and envy of fellow men." Because male wage earners are too circumspect to indulge themselves, they deposit consumption on surrogates, on loved ones. Vicarious ostentation--the way that plainly dressed Victorian men encouraged their wives and daughters to wear complicated trappings of wealth--is how this unfolds. Ditto their servants, horses, and even house pets.