Status symbols 2.0: How to show off now
From not having a mobile to escaping to your second-home ‘retreat’, Harriet Walker looks at the latest social signifiers.
HE’S rich, she’s beautiful. He buys her a $4000 exercise bike that she clearly doesn’t need and she creates a teary video diary for him of her emotional journey in the saddle. We’re almost numb to the onslaught of goodlooking people trying to sell us things on telly at this time of year, but this advert from the luxe athome exercise brand Peloton caused outrage online last week. The internet fell about at the vision of a benign, controlling husband gifting his noticeably lithe wife the means to improve her selfesteem.
Shares in Peloton – which sells bikes with screens attached so that users can stream and join in with Manhattan spin classes in their homes – fell 15 per cent, with US$1.5 billion (NZ$2.3b) of value wiped in a week. Yet the bikes remain at the top of most 1 per cent gift lists this year, because in 2019, status is no longer about what others think, but how you feel on the inside.
Only joking, status is still very much about generating inadequacy in one’s peers. Status 2.0, however, must come with the sort of self-righteous glow even Harley Street specialists can’t provide, or it is socially and spiritually meaningless.
‘‘There is a shift under way in the upper echelons,’’ declares a piece on the new status symbols in the January issue of Tatler. ‘‘Where in the 2010s status was signified by what you were doing, in the 2020s it’s about what you’re not doing, as it was in the last Gilded Age.’’ Let’s not forget that the Gilded Age was also about how many utilities one owned.
For a decade we have worshipped work and aspired to busy-ness: the suit hailing a taxi as he yells into a mobile phone, the boss sending emails as she has her bikini line maintained. But as hours worked no longer translate to wealth accrued and the cracks begin to show in late-era capitalism, the commodities in shortest supply, and therefore the most precious, are health and spare time. These are the ways to outbid the Joneses now, hence Peloton’s success and the reason that so many high-achievers can be found pedalling furiously in their lofts during the small hours.
Peloton, like museum-wing levels of philanthropy, fits perfectly into a zeitgeisty Venn diagram between something most people can’t afford and improving one’s health, one’s ethical credentials or one’s tax burden. See also: a US$72,000 Tesla electric car, £40 (NZ$80) bamboo toilet paper and an EU passport, which will soon come down to either birth or an advantageous marriage, much like an Oscar Wilde play.
Time was, a designer It bag and a new car would secure your place on a certain rung of the ladder, but there’s nothing quite like the Joneses going vegan and taking up daily yoga on their return from three weeks at the life-prolonging Austrian health spa the Lanserhof (by train, you understand, they don’t fly any more) to make your expensive blingy baubles feel like Christmas cracker tchotchkes by comparison. Ditch the diamonds, put down the Porsche – flashing the cash is more complicated than it used to be.
Status now comes not from doing weights while on a conference call in a corner office, but from spending as little of one’s time as possible at others’ behest. Forget your Rolex and your Rolodex, trade high net worth for self-worth and give everyone your secretary’s mobile number this Christmas so you can enjoy that most golden of privileges: silence.
Going off-grid – no phones, no wifi – is the most impressive luxury that money can buy. When one ultra-VIP fashion industry hen party decamped to a castle in the Highlands for a long weekend this summer, high-fashion etailers lost the equivalent of a small country’s GDP. Rewearing recognisable
outfits multiple times like the Duchesses of Cambridge and Sussex is a strong status indicator: wear the same dress to every wedding and tell people you are trying to cut down your retail footprint. Not shopping is the
new Pretty Woman snooty boutique scene, just as not drinking (and talking about it) is the new Krug with sparklers at Tramp. Tramp, of course, is the new Pizza Express, and the latter has become a status symbol in its own right because to eat at one now is the Brexit equivalent of digging for victory.
Twentieth-century status came from building theme parks on your property like Michael Jackson and Dolly Parton – Barbra Streisand had a private shopping mall installed – but today’s superrich are more interested in whether their apocalypse-proof end-times ranch has a borehole.
If the Noughties were about partying at clubs that turned away the sort of people who wear trainers, these days Silicon Valley types – who wear little else – have no interest in being allowed beyond the velvet rope, but head to second homes they call ‘‘retreats’’. That these places are in the middle of nowhere and don’t have running water is something that the city-dwelling, power-showering masses have come to envy. If you can’t stretch to real dilapidation in the countryside, at least have some shiny Crittall windows installed on your London home to balance things out.
According to Tatler, a shift from Fomo (the fear of missing out) to Jomo (the joy of missing out) lies at the heart of the new status, although this is, of course, heavily reliant on having the contacts, confidence and resources to ensure that your existence is far more interesting than anyone else’s. In lieu of these, anyone who has spent time with people who do mindfulness will know this is one way to convince yourself that you are the most interesting topic of any conversation.
Another form of stealth one-upmanship that you can practise mysteriously at home is to read every hyped book that comes out and then talk about them a lot. The most high-powered Christmas present you can ask for is the new Hilary Mantel on order (it’s out in March), which offers a triple whammy of ahead-of-the-curve cultural capital, a head start on the plebs and a smug situation whereby you have nothing to unwrap on Christmas Day. Simply watching others as they guiltily tear through paper that will need recycling to reveal gifts they didn’t want scores highly on the sustainable and the status charts.
Otherwise, put a £995 Big Green Egg ceramic barbecue on your list, so you can give it pride of place in your ‘‘outdoor kitchen’’. These are highly prized by Michelin chefs and therefore also by ‘‘foodies’’ who like to reduce every meal to ash in one’s mouth by talking about how much it cost.
An artisan beehive is another great status gift, because it will drip with as much eco-virtue as it will honey. On the amuse-bouche front, foie gras has been banned on cruelty grounds in New York City – one of the cruellest places on Earth, but also the most status-driven – so serving it is now an ultra-no. Replace with a kinder status meat, such as wagyu beef.
Turning down tasty-looking snacks has long been a power move among the fashion crowd, where thin remains the ultimate indication of importance, but extreme ectomorphism is being superseded by what industry types are calling the ‘‘couture body’’. Think Jennifer Lopez, 50, halfnaked on the Versace catwalk in September. Hers is a bespoke physique that is slight, but also strong, and has been earned across a multitude of pricey studio classes, gym sessions and regular poledancing sessions. Hard to achieve without hourly paid help and even harder to achieve if you have a full-time job. Looks as though a Peloton is your best option after all.