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US$1,000 SWEATSHIRTS
It is not just the sneakers. You have a wide field of choice among US$500 cotton T-shirts, US$1,000 sweatshirts and so on. The industry’s best effort to justify these prices is to make athleisure – puffer coats, joggers, whatever – out of cashmere and vicuna.
And maybe vicuna keeps its shape a little longer, looks a little nicer, or is softer to the touch. But this is not the point. The expensive materials are there to resolve a contradiction that is becoming a bit too obvious for intelligent people, however vain, to bear.
I’m not asserting that all very expensive clothes are laughable. Things that are handmade or hand-finished entail a lot of expensive skilled labour. A bespoke suit or dress at US$5,000 has much more economic logic to it than a US$500 T-shirt.
Whether bespoke is worth the price is another question (a question that I, living on a journalist’s salary, will never be able to answer). In general, good construction costs a lot. At the same time, good design is beautiful, and good designers deserve to be paid a premium for their work.
But the prices of luxury goods have, quite obviously, shot beyond what the brands’ chatter about look and quality can justify.
I am not saying that we should just simply stop worrying about status and its display. One might as well argue that we should give up on walking on two legs and revert to scampering on all fours. Status seeking is wired into us in the same way language is.
Those who insist (as several will in the comments section below) that they care nothing for status and its symbols invariably suffer the most from class anxiety, and are left the most indignant by the little slights and power plays that make up everyday life. I’d go further: Clothes and other matters of taste are a relatively benign way to signal and celebrate status, much to be preferred to snobbery based on, say, political party or ancestry.
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