MAGIC MARKERS
Some things proclaim ‘I belong to the upper echelons’

By Kimberley Noble

Need proof that status-seeking has reached new heights? Forget Cartier or Palm Beach mansions or even the fact that we have all those Internet billionaires lining up to plunk down $20 million a pop so they can play astronaut. I’ve recently concluded that to see where things are headed these heady, acquisitive days, you need look no further than your nearest high-end shoe emporium.

Take, for example, the one in a certain Fifth Avenue department store built in a famous mansion adjacent to New York’s Plaza Hotel. Even the carriage trade likes a post-Christmas sale, and this year, when the cream of Manhattan society came looking for a good bargain on Manolo Blahniks, they found it, providing they were willing to rummage through piles reminiscent of a clear-out at the strip mall.

“There were piles and piles of shoes,” recalls an onlooker, who remains both slightly shocked and vaguely amused by the spectacle. “And these were $400, $500, $600 shoes. What does it say about the world we live in when $600 shoes are sold in piles, like at Kmart?”

It is a very good question, but one that bears looking at from the other point of view. For the better part of a decade, women of substance and taste could show that they belonged to one of humanity’s upper echelons simply by wearing shoes that have come to be known by the first name of their Spanish-born creator. Sociologists call them markers: garments, adornments or modes of dress enlisted by human beings to signal membership in a desirable group.

Markers of status have been around ever since some clever primate first decided to wear an especially large set of sharp teeth around his neck as a sign of hunting prowess, and to urge his mate to go ahead and wear the animal’s impressive fur on a reasonably warm day—and found that hunters and gatherers in their chosen circle decided to do the same.

“We want to be identified with the most powerful,” says University of Toronto sociologist Elijah Dann, the source of the pricey footwear story. “We want to associate with the person with the biggest clubs, who can kill the most game and acquire the most goods. If we are part of their tribe, we will be taken care of and kept safe.”

Status markers lose their power, however, when everybody, including other less successful tribes, do the same, i.e., when Manolos become so popular and plentiful that the world’s best shoe emporiums start selling them practically by the pound. To a certain extent, we can blame Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw and other pop-culture trend-setters, both fictional and real, who can, almost overnight, create a groundswell of demand for what were once exclusive badges of wealth and taste. But this can also be attributed to sheer economic growth. “There is such a huge amount of money out there, in the hands of people who are searching for new ways to spend it,” says Glenn Pushelberg, whose ultra-chic Toronto design firm, Yabu Pushelberg, counts many of these people among its clients. “There are many, many minor millionaires, compared with 20 years ago. Everybody has a Rolex watch, a Louis Vuitton purse.” This, he says, begs the question: What do you do when all of the luxury goods are available to the masses?

The solution, as always, is found in identifying and acquiring markers of status that are even more exclusive. Bigger. Better. More expensive. Harder to get hold of or, in the case of neighbourhoods and schools, to get into. (For the latest and most entertaining examples, see the following pages.) That said, just like everything else in our fast-paced modern world, it appears that status-seeking behaviour has been forced to adapt to changing circumstances.

In the past—or at least in the century or so since the pursuit of status became a recognized subject of academic research, and a rebellious American economist named Thorstein Veblen came up with the term “conspicuous consumption”—status seekers could always rely on some showy display of worldly goods to signal their good fortune. Now that such goods are no longer a reliable indicator, the trends seem to point in three directions.

First, there are the handcrafted, handmade, one-of-a-kind items. “That’s what the real billionaires look for, because there are so few things left in the world that are unique, exclusive to one person,” Pushelberg says. For example, the solution to one’s footwear dilemma can now be found at Rickard Shah, a London-based fashion designer that uses a new 3-D, high-tech body-scanning device to design and make custom shoes for its (literally) well-heeled clients. Feet are scanned in the Belgravia boutique, and the specifications sent to Florence where the leather is cut and assembled by world-renowned cobblers. Even better is the cost, which ranges from $625 to $800 US, including the scan. Vogue magazine has declared this custom footwear to be far superior to those tacky see-through jobs that Cinderella’s godmother threw together for that ball.

At the extreme other end of the custom-made spectrum, one finds the 400-plus-foot mega-yachts belonging to Saudi billionaires and their North American counterparts—software sheiks, like Microsoft’s Paul Allen and Oracle’s Larry Ellison. These floating mansions—many of them designed and crafted by shipbuilder-to-the-aristocracy Lürssen at its top-secret super-yacht factory on Germany’s Weser River—have in recent years been cited as the ultimate status symbol among the world’s super-rich.

Clearly, the very existence of such boats, which can cost upwards of $200 million and measure more than 170 metres in length, is remarkable, actually spawning a media subculture that does nothing but track and report on the progress of their construction.

Illustration by Kagan Mcleod

I find this sort of old-fashioned conspicuous consumption reassuring, like the Tiffany salesman in the Audrey Hepburn film who says that knowing you can still get prizes in Cracker Jack gives him a “feeling of solidarity, almost of continuity into the past.” This provides a link, not only with the past but also with nature. It means that underneath all that alpha male posturing, software billionaires might not be all that different from another of the planet’s oddly compelling creatures—the tropical bower bird, which, in addition to its iridescent plumage, constructs elaborate structures, known as bowers, out of twigs, leaves, moss and whatever colourful materials it can find, not as nests but as flashy bachelor pads to display status and—the bower bird hopes—attract the maximum number of willing mates.

However timeless this behaviour, mega-yachts are even more interesting for what they say about the changing nature of social and business status. Unlike a personal jet, the ultimate status symbol of the 1990s, a boat the size of a cricket ground does not tend to be used for business as well as pleasure. It does not say that its owner is a busy guy whose day is packed with far-flung business meetings. Instead, a mega-yacht says that its owner has made his fortune and is now in possession of what have become the most valuable of human commodities: well-earned and enormously expensive leisure, and vast expanses of personal space.

Because while mega-yachts would seem to be pretty tangible proof that Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption is alive and well and living in the 21st century, they also convey a sense of having limitless space in a crowded world—a concept that points to another trend, which I will call non-conspicuous consumption.

Have you noticed how the Victorian notion that wealth was represented by rooms crammed with furniture and personal bric-a-brac has made way in modern times for the extreme opposite? How these days, only the worker bees inhabit the same rooms as their possessions, whereas the successful can afford to store their possessions out of sight and live in cavernous rooms containing nothing but a couple of leather chairs and a kick-ass entertainment system?

In his new book, Don’t Get Too Comfortable, Canadian expat GQ columnist David Rakoff takes this even further. He describes how the greedy ’80s gave way to the “even greedier ’90s, when money flowed like water and everybody’s boat rose with the tide” and documents the process by which, when consumer goods and other traditional status symbols lose their power, status-seeking humans react by fetishizing the basic commodities of human existence. Rakoff’s favourite examples are Scottish ice cubes and French sea salt, which in turn become absurdly expensive luxury items. In a chapter entitled “What is the Sound of One Hand Shopping?” he writes: “We have become an army of multiply chemically sensitive, high-maintenance princesses trying to make our way through a world of irksome peas.”

While this is certainly true of the specific tribe that Rakoff makes his living from by observing them—young, wealthy, status-seeking cosmopolitans—sociologists contend that other tribes display different behaviours. No description of contemporary status symbols would be complete without noting that status depends not only on the traditional factors—financial, social and cultural capital—but also on age. “You get both class and generational differences,” says Douglas Mann, who teaches sociology and philosophy at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ont., citing the fact that a big, luxurious SUV would mean nothing to most of his students, whereas “the latest MP3 player in a pink case” would be equally meaningless to older people. “So, the way you display and detect status,” he explains, “changes throughout your life.”

With that concept in mind, one Bay Street anthropologist identified a third major trend when it comes to what Canada’s richest and most powerful consider the ultimate display of status: gainfully employed offspring. “There is so much pressure among the upper classes to work hard, be successful, make money, live in the big houses, have the right holidays, the whole rat race. Along the way, there’s mini-status if your kids get into the right schools; there’s mini-status if they get good marks; there’s mini-status if they get into a good university and maybe go to grad school.

“But after all that, what people are worried about is that after all this they’ve maybe spoiled their kids, that there will be something wrong with them and the kid will never work and you will support them forever.” He says he’s not kidding. This is a huge preoccupation, even among people who have everything else. “The highest status symbol among the affluent class is adult children who are self-supporting.”

Finally, it seems that for the ultimate tribal leaders—the old-moneyed billionaires that the subservient status-seekers spend their lives trying to emulate—the ultimate symbols of status turn out to be nothing at all. “The new money wants the American Dream,” says Pushelberg. “The big money stays hidden, especially in Canada.” In his experience, the only thing people with top status want are their basic simple comforts, their family and friends, and privacy. “People who have truly large amounts of wealth know who they are,” he says, “and they don’t need anything else.”