The Best Theory of Why People Buy Fashion Was Written 125 Years Ago

Much ink has been spilled through the decades on theories – cultural, economic, behavioral – about how we consume fashion. Some have their merits, others don’t. But no theory has come close to accurately describing it than that of the American economist Thorstein Veblen. 

In 1899, Veblen published a book titled The Theory of the Leisure Class that aimed to offer to the American economists, at the time obsessed with mathematic efficiency, a different theory of why people engage in consumption.

With this book, that eventually took on a life of its own outside of the narrow academic circles by morphing into a sociological study, Veblen was pointing out to his colleagues that they were making a serious mistake in not considering the behavioral and cultural aspects of consumption. To him most consumption was status-driven, and therefore absolutely irrational in its rationale. The gist of his argument was this; in the first degree consumption is driven by the rich – the leisure class – who acquire markers of status in order to signal their wealth, and the rest of society consumes in order to emulate their behavior. This goes for everything from houses, to cars, to vacations, and of course, fashion. Veblen coined the term for what the leisure class does – conspicuous consumption – that is still widely used. As for the rest, their behavior is classified as aspirational consumption. The two are closely related cousins.

Fashion was the only consumption category to which Veblen devoted an entire chapter. To him fashion was the most obvious avenue for conspicuous consumption, because fashion is on constant display. He postulated that in contemporary society being wealthy on its own is not enough, and that one must constantly signal their wealth in order to signal their status. And while houses and their interiors, yachts, and art on your walls are important signifiers of wealth, they do not have the same signaling power as clothes do, because they are not constantly seen by others. You cannot wear your art to a restaurant (though these days you can put it on Instagram, which has been one of the biggest drivers of speeding up consumption for household goods). Whereas before the industrial revolution and the rise of the modern city the rich largely socialized in private, in Veblen’s time their spheres of socialization increasingly shifted to public places, requiring constant signaling of status, which made the clothes ever more important.

But consuming luxury fashion, according to Veblen, is simply the first step on the ladder of providing “evidence of pecuniary success.” One must not only consume it, but do it often, because conspicuous consumption is driven by conspicuous waste. It is not enough for the rich to simply buy, the true display of pecuniary (that is monetary) strength lies in the fact that they can discard their perfectly fine clothes at a regular interval in order to buy new ones. This is really what drives the artificial and arbitrary changes in fashion, though in order to hide this fact, “The law of conspicuous waste guides consumption in apparel, as in other things, chiefly at the second remove, by shaping the canons of taste and decency.” In other words, Bernard Arnault does not tell you that you must buy LVMH products often – the magazines, beholden to advertisers, and your peers, influenced by the magazines, will tell you that. 

And because the rest of society is driven by aspirational consumption, over the last 125 years the mentality of conspicuous waste has percolated down to accepted social norms, such as the taboo on wearing the same outfit twice a week. This emulative behavior is what drives fast fashion, by allowing the middle class to emulate the conspicuous waste mentality of the rich (see the numerous SHEIN haul videos on YouTube and TikTok). 

But conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste exist in the service of the final goal of the rich; to signal that the person who is engaging in both does not have to work for a living (“conspicuous leisure”). This is why the color white (and other light colors), for example, is considered part of the uniform of the wealthy – no sensible person engaged in any productive activity (or even one who has to ride the New York City subway) would wear a color that can easily be stained. White is a color that requires to be chauffeured. 

The law of conspicuous leisure has also shaped other canons of taste. For example, in earlier times it was considered uncouth for the members of the upper classes to have a tan, because that’s what peasants got by working outdoors. This changed in the 20th Century with the rise of the white collar worker. All of a sudden a tan signified that you did not spend countless hours at the office but had money and time to lay on a beach (presumably by taking a private plane to St. Tropez). Today, the toned body is the main marker of conspicuous leisure, because its possessor signals that they have significant time and money to devote oneself to wellness, the new religion of the rich. 

Because the rich are emulated by the rest, they constantly have to move the goalposts of what constitutes a status marker, so as not to be confused with the rest. To illustrate, let’s bring it back to fashion. Luxury fashion used to be the purview of the rich. In Veblen’s time, for a rich woman changing outfits was a full time job (I once toured a Vanderbilt mansion and the guide told us that the women vacationing there changed outfits eight times a day.) But through the emulative process, eventually luxury fashion has become thoroughly ingrained in the middle class (the poor buy the knockoffs), and so the rich had to shift how they dress. Enter athleisure.

The fact that athleisure is now worn largely outside of its intended purpose – exercise – hints at the cult of wellness. But it began even more subtly; athleisure first was worn by rich women outside because it signaled roughly the following statement, “Oh, I just decided to grab a coffee / brunch after my yoga class around the corner from my SoHo loft / Park Avenue apartment / Beverly Hills mansion.” By wearing athleisure these women signaled that while any dentist’s wife from New Jersey can now afford a logoed Gucci belt, she cannot afford expensive real-estate. By now of course the middle class has caught on, and even those who, as evidenced by their body size, cannot engage in wellness because they have to work for a living, can engage in status-emulating behavior by stretching Lycra over their ample curves. (The rich are quietly moving the goalposts again, hence all the talk of “quiet luxury,” as per Veblenian law of the second remove.)

The only thing Veblen has not foreseen – how could he, in 1899 – is the new class of the rich, and that is the entertainers. Money caché is now often matched by cultural caché, and the former now often comes from the latter. (W. David Marx explores this phenomenon in his recent book, Status and Culture, where he distinguishes between financial capital and cultural capital.) And the mechanisms for dissemination of status signaling have changed and amplified due to social media. This is how you get the celebrity-fashion industrial complex and Pharrell designing Louis Vuitton menswear. But though the makeup of the classes to be emulated and the machinery for signaling status may have changed, the essential principles for consuming fashion postulated by Veblen have remained the same. To illustrate, I will leave you with this 2019 masterpiece from GQ, “The Enormous Appetites of Lil Uzi Vert.”