Pre-teens are crowding the aisles of Sephora in search of Drunk Elephant. Grown women are re-enacting the Black Fridays of yore to buy gigantic insulated drinking cups.
It’s 2024. Nearly no one without generational wealth can afford a house, the youngest generations can barely afford rent on an entire apartment, and the laundry detergent at Target is locked in a cage.
Conspicuous consumption in 2024 doesn’t look how it did when Thorstein Veblen coined the term in 1899. After all, Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class described the economic behavior of nouveau riche Victorians and not middle-class people in the 2020s. But is there relevance to the idea of buying goods as a public show of status? Oh, absolutely.
Right now there’s no better forum than TikTok to share your purchases. The vast majority of us have bought products recommended by an influencer. Social media, and TikTok in particular, is at the heart of consumer trends. It isn’t simply that advertisers get a lot of use out of TikTok, it’s that shopping comprises a significant amount of content on the platform.
Right now, TikTok-driven commercial trends are attached to middle-class suburban signals— car dependency, access to large chains and big box stores, and discretionary income.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Our status symbols are indicative of our times. The most ‘consumerist’ influencers look little like modern Vanderbilts as they trot into Home Goods. While #luxurytok exists, the consumerism that takes over the platform is that of the middle class. One might argue these trends are working class given America’s amorphous sense of ‘middle.’
What is happening on TikTok with these trends is a redefinition of luxury and status. Unlike Veblen’s time, companies are aiming to sell to working-class and middle-class people instead of a new-money leisure class. That means the most popular items have to be popular. As in, accessible to a large swath of consumers.
A Stanley tumbler is under $50, Drunk Elephant is under $100, and UGG slippers will run you just under $150. Yet, there’s a feeling these items convey status— specifically, the status of disposable income. When half of your generation can’t afford rent that means something.
Another complication in taking on Veblen when it comes to influencer-consumer behavior is influencers are salespeople. Their performance of consumption is often deeply couched advertising for affiliates or else exists to attract potential sponsors. Their consumption isn’t solely tied to the demonstration of social standing. It is also a necessity of production.
Everyone is a worker. Yes, even the influencers convincing you to head to their affiliate links. We are less in an economy of widespread leisured excess (at least not below the top percent) than we are of scarcity.
But we want better. We want housing security, we want wages high enough to give us disposable income, and the free time to spend it. When those things are out of reach corporations can sell us the next best thing— the appearance of financial security. it just so happens to look like a big cup.