Question
What are some contemporary status symbols in the Western world?
Answer
I'll stick to status symbols of the product variety. Services are too complex to analyze and segue into lifestyles and therefore into a discussion of "status" proper, rather than the symbols thereof.
The book Trading Up has some really interesting recent market research on the subject of the "New Luxury."
The basic idea is that luxury has now gone middle class: people try to be frugal in most areas of their life, but go for luxury in a few areas they care about. For example, the book cites the example of an amateur golfer (a plumber or something I believe) who bought Big Bertha golf clubs, apparently the best available. He explained his decision with a "this is one area where I have the best. Tiger Woods may have a lot more money, but even he can't get better clubs than these."
Luxury Business by Specific Sector and Market has changed drastically in the last century thanks to industrialization and consumerism. Entire categories of products have been created which simply do not respect the traditional down-market/up-market distinction. There really is no up-market version of Coca-Cola (soft drink). Celebrities make the news by revealing that they still love their McDonald's (fast food chain) burgers ...
The old theories of luxury (Thorstein Veblen in Theory of the Leisure Class) still hold, as do theories of status, but industrialization has complicated things. Old Luxury was about craft over commodity. That was when great craftsmen could produce stuff that was better than industrial processes. Poor people and middle class people used mass-manufactured stuff. Rich people had custom-made stuff.
That logic has gotten seriously mangled now. In some categories (Private Jets for instance), there is really no room for "craft" in the traditional sense. It's just mass market engineering reapplied to the premium sector. If you've ever seen ads for things like "luxury laptops" (diamond encrusted for example), you realize the problem. A laptop is a product whose evolution is so directly tied to improvements driven by the mass market that there are really no meaningful premium features you can add for rich people. So you get idiotic things like diamonds.
Seriously modern/high-tech things only acquire a true luxury segment when they become basically useless, like watches. Nobody really needs wristwatches anymore. There are clocks everywhere from your cellphone to your microwave. So wrist watches have become jewelry, and so meaningless differentiators to do with precision and electronics are talked about the same way the gold/platinum aspects are.
In a way you could say that the only true status symbols are products whose basic function has become irrelevant and subservient to their role as "art" which can be as arbitrary as necessary to let the elites stand out in meaningless ways that the non-elites cannot copy.
The book Trading Up has some really interesting recent market research on the subject of the "New Luxury."
The basic idea is that luxury has now gone middle class: people try to be frugal in most areas of their life, but go for luxury in a few areas they care about. For example, the book cites the example of an amateur golfer (a plumber or something I believe) who bought Big Bertha golf clubs, apparently the best available. He explained his decision with a "this is one area where I have the best. Tiger Woods may have a lot more money, but even he can't get better clubs than these."
Luxury Business by Specific Sector and Market has changed drastically in the last century thanks to industrialization and consumerism. Entire categories of products have been created which simply do not respect the traditional down-market/up-market distinction. There really is no up-market version of Coca-Cola (soft drink). Celebrities make the news by revealing that they still love their McDonald's (fast food chain) burgers ...
The old theories of luxury (Thorstein Veblen in Theory of the Leisure Class) still hold, as do theories of status, but industrialization has complicated things. Old Luxury was about craft over commodity. That was when great craftsmen could produce stuff that was better than industrial processes. Poor people and middle class people used mass-manufactured stuff. Rich people had custom-made stuff.
That logic has gotten seriously mangled now. In some categories (Private Jets for instance), there is really no room for "craft" in the traditional sense. It's just mass market engineering reapplied to the premium sector. If you've ever seen ads for things like "luxury laptops" (diamond encrusted for example), you realize the problem. A laptop is a product whose evolution is so directly tied to improvements driven by the mass market that there are really no meaningful premium features you can add for rich people. So you get idiotic things like diamonds.
Seriously modern/high-tech things only acquire a true luxury segment when they become basically useless, like watches. Nobody really needs wristwatches anymore. There are clocks everywhere from your cellphone to your microwave. So wrist watches have become jewelry, and so meaningless differentiators to do with precision and electronics are talked about the same way the gold/platinum aspects are.
In a way you could say that the only true status symbols are products whose basic function has become irrelevant and subservient to their role as "art" which can be as arbitrary as necessary to let the elites stand out in meaningless ways that the non-elites cannot copy.