The Atlantic - 04.2020

APRIL 2020 19

MATERIAL WORLD

As with many aesthetically
pleasing food trends that have
thrived in the era of constant
internet access, the value of a
deluxe cupcake isn’t necessar-
ily in its physical consumption.
Instead, it’s more like an edible
Gucci logo belt, or a sprinkle-
topped boutique hotel with a
beautifully decorated lobby bar
and painfully cramped showers.
These goods are the least expen-
sive way to gain temporary
entry to a particular consumer
class—for example, Gucci belts
cost $450, while one of the
brand’s bags could easily set
you back $3,500. The brand’s
belts are not any better at belt-
ing than many far less expen-
sive options, but they provide
a conduit for a person of mid-
dling means to transport herself
into the lavish life she wants, if
only within the highly edited
confines of a carefully staged
Instagram photo.
Crumbs Bake Shop expan-
ded to 79 locations in the Uni-
ted States before it went out of
business in 2014, but the value
system that enabled it remains:
A plethora of subpar options
is the foundation of modern
shopping. Most Millennials
were too young to get a foot-
hold in the economy before
it fell out from under them,
and now, confronted with the
precarious ness of working- and
middle-class life in the decade
after the Great Recession, the
most many can do is playact
modern success for as long as
possible while hoping the real
thing happens eventually.
All of the faux-Eames chairs
the internet tried to sell me are
props for this Kabuki theater:
things you buy because they’re
masquerading as more excep-
tional than they are. Some of
these products are perfectly
good at fulfilling their func-
tion, but they paper over a

problem of class mobility that

consumer choices can’t change.

The market has looked upon

the people it serves and said,

“Let them eat cupcakes.”

Social strivers have

been buying knockoffs in

America since modern con-

sumerism took shape, in the

decades after World War II.

The advent of industrialized

manufacturing and mass media

helped create marketing as we

know it, but it’s hard to imagine

that the internet would be so

bloated with speciously opu-

lent mid-priced home decor

and personal- wellness products

if not for celebrities and, more

recently, Instagram.

Rao is right to date the

acceleration of premium medi-

ocrity to the late 2000s, but it

wasn’t just the recession that

drove the phenomenon. The

streets of Los Angeles and New

York had turned into paparazzi

wonder lands, fueled by a mix-

ture of booming tabloid sales

and new blockbuster gossip

blogs such as TMZ. Photog-

raphers tailed Paris Hilton,

Lindsay Lohan, and Nicole

Richie while they bought lattes

and spilled out of nightclubs;

then journalists and bloggers

detailed exactly what they were

wearing, carry ing, and driving

for a ravenous audience, often

offering up “looks for less” to

help readers imitate what they

saw. This was the first time

most Americans got such an

exhaustive and unvarnished

look at how famous people

behave when they’re not on

the red carpet—a glimpse of

the wealth that had previously

been consigned to the pages

of glossy fashion magazines,

where it was cleaned up and

made tasteful, or to the per-

sonal knowledge of maids,

cooks, and assistants.

The meteoric popularity

of Instagram in the 2010s has

meant that not only can the

famous detail their favorite

clothes, snacks, and skin-care

lines for their fans, but so can

the run-of-the-mill wealthy,

who sometimes amass audi-

ences in the six or seven fig-

ures. With that many fol-

lowers, the random rich can

charge brands to feature their

stuff—the upshot being that,

absent a notable skill or exper-

tise, a passel of ordinary and

in many cases insipid people

parlay family wealth or a remu-

nerative marriage into a busi-

ness all its own. For many of

us, however, luxury is only cre-

ative artifice. In previous gen-

erations, fake it ’til you make

it might have meant embel-

lishing your résumé to land

a stable corporate job with a

pension. Now it means pair-

ing a Gucci belt with a Zara

wardrobe and hoping you’re

hot enough to eventually hawk

teeth-whitening gadgets.

Even if conspicuous con-

sumption is a less-than- reliable

career path, sometimes the

look-for-less products we buy

work great. And when they

do, you feel like you’re slipping

through a tear in the fabric of

capitalism. My $250 bookcase

displays my books—both in

real life and in photographs—

just as well as the $1,499 one

I balked at buying. I recently

spent $35 on a viral hair gadget

that makes my hair look pro-

fessionally styled in a way that

my $300 blow-dryer never

has. It’s intoxicating to believe

for a moment that maybe rich

people are the ones who have

been getting conned all along,

spending their money on cars

and vacations and sweaters that

aren’t that much nicer than

what regular people can afford.

Every time I dared to dream

that I had somehow hacked

taste in the year after I pur-

chased the fake Eames chairs,

the chairs quickly reminded me

of my hubris. Money buys you

plenty of advantages in a soci-

ety built to reward its accumu-

lation, and it almost certainly

buys you chairs that don’t need

to be flipped over once a week

to have their screws tightened.

That’s what I regularly did

until a visiting friend tumbled

out of one and onto the floor,

at which point my embarrass-

ment about my own premium

mediocrity overtook the finan-

cial worries that had consigned

me to it. I bought solid metal

dining chairs, which were more

expensive than my knockoffs

but less likely to fail at their

one job. In the end, the inter-

net worked exactly as it’s been

designed to: I caved to the thrill

of a deal that felt too good to be

true, and when that turned out

to be the case, I went back out

to shop again.

Amanda Mull is a staff writer

at The Atlantic.

EVERY TIME

I DARED

TO DREAM

THAT I’D

SOMEHOW

HACKED TASTE

AFTER I

PURCHASED

THE FAKE

EAMES CHAIRS,

THE CHAIRS

QUICKLY

REMINDED

ME OF

MY HUBRIS.