Advertisement

The New Status Seekers : In the 1980s, People Have Been Forced to Find Ever More Creative Ways : of Showing They’ve Arrived

Share
<i> Nina J. Easton is a Los Angeles financial writer. </i>

WHEN THEY’RE OUT CAMPAIGNING, most of the men running for President make their way around in modest vans or borrowed cars. When they use a plane, it is usually rented, small and cramped. When they fly commercial, it’s coach.

These men may know a lot about agricultural price supports and welfare reform and the window of vulnerability, but they don’t know anything about arriving in style.

Donald Trump, the New York real estate magnate, billionaire, “Doonesbury” star, People magazine cover boy and occasional commentator on the great issues of our day, may not know as much about national policy as he thinks, but he knows how to make an entrance. When a brief “Trump-for-President” boomlet brought him to address a group of New Hampshire Republicans last fall, he arrived, not in a van or a dingy turboprop, but in his $8-million, black, French Aerospatiale Super Puma military jet helicopter.

Advertisement

A showman if not a statesman, Trump understands how much it takes to turn heads today. In the mass-merchandised, affluent society America has become, finding the right symbol to connote our station in life is, like everything else in the modern world, increasingly complex and demanding. In the go-go years of the 1980s, people have been forced to find ever more creative ways of announcing that they have arrived--like $8-million helicopters. Other decades have been devoted to getting and spending, but none as feverishly as this one. In the Reagan years, it’s been as if someone took a tape from the 1920s or 1950s and played it on fast forward. “We really have had a frenzy of it in the last seven years,” says Tina Brown, editor of Vanity Fair, one of a few magazines that serve as sort of status umpires.

Nowhere has the game been played more intently than in Los Angeles. “What, after all, is a status symbol? It’s a focus on appearances in association with a particular object that you think enhances your sense of self. Los Angeles is an area that is very focused on appearances,” says David Brandt, a San Francisco psychologist and author of “Is That All There Is?,” a study of baby-boomer disillusionment.

Now, as the decade winds down, the mood may be changing again. Nothing will stop the Trumps from buying new and better toys; we’re not heading back to the anti-materialism of the 1960s. But after the frantic acquisition that marked the early 1980s and the sickening thud of the stock market in October, we may be heading for what Brown calls “status burnout.” Marketing consultant Faith Popcorn, chairman of BrainReserve Inc., calls the phenomenon “yuppie glut” and sees the next great trend as “cashing out”-- turning down the promotion, the long hours and the hectic coast-to-coast trips to devote more time to family, friends and community. More and more of today’s obsessive achievers, she predicts, will begin measuring their success not by their possessions but “by how many friends they’ve got, what a good family they’ve got, how the kids are turning out.” For a snapshot of that next wave in status, think of Diane Keaton in the movie “Baby Boom.”

EIGHTY-EIGHT YEARS AGO,when Thorstein Veblen published “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” his classic look at social stratification, the pursuit of status was an uncomplicated affair. Class lines were clear. For the rich, more was better. Much more was even better. Huge mansions, huge masked balls, endless extravagance--all conducted in full public view--marked what the robber barons considered tasteful arrival. All of this left the emerging middle class cold. Sober and grave, America’s turn-of-the-century burghers watched these ostentations with pious disgust. But that disdain dissolved once the middle class was able to afford more luxury. By the 1920s people began to model their behavior on the upper class, says UCLA sociologist William Roy.

The Depression derailed both the mass marketing of status and the most conspicuous of consumption. With one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished, fewer people had enough money to get by, let alone impress anyone else.

The boom that followed World War II jumpstarted the stalled rush to middle-class status. Possessions whose scarcity had set apart their owners now became abundant. Home ownership had been a privilege reserved for the few, but the unadorned four-room boxes that spread from Long Island’s Levittown to the exploding suburbs of Southern California brought it to the many. As a status symbol, the basic single-family house was thus depreciated. So too were automobiles and televisions, which poured into American homes after the war.

Advertisement

With millions of Americans now routinely acquiring things that only the most fortunate once enjoyed, many analysts thought that the young families of suburbia might relax, confident that they were not only living better than their parents, but probably better than their parents had ever dreamed. What this analysis neglected was the first iron law of status: As Queens College sociologist Paul Blumberg says, “The quest for status is unending, regardless of how affluent people become.” Vance Packard concluded in his landmark 1959 book, “The Status Seekers,” that material abundance merely intensified what he called “status straining.” As the ‘50s progressed, owning a thing was no longer enough. To make neighbors take notice, people had to own ever more elaborate things--things whose very form screamed status.

Merchandisers began selling status without the wrapping; they stamped status on the wrapping. Developers began advertising their homes in French, or offering “Huge 1/3 Acre Estate Sites.” Auto makers freighted their behemoths with features designed only to put others in their place. In one ad for Ford, a woman pointed to the car’s enormous taillights, which “let the people behind you know you are ahead of them.”

This national nod toward what Veblen called conspicuous consumption drew the inevitable backlash in the mid-1960s. It began as an inchoate anti-materialism among well-off young people, college students whose symbol became the Volkswagen Beetle, the un-cola of cars. Though most college students tooling around in their unassuming bugs could have afforded more luxury, more room, more status, their strange little car--so alien to everything that America seemed to prize--allowed them to tell the world that they were smart enough to see through the manipulative pretensions of Detroit.

Status symbols survived the onslaught of mass-marketed materialism after World War II, and they toughed out the arrival of anti-materialism 20 years later, too. They simply changed form again. Though acquisitions never went out of style entirely--many people went on spending, oblivious to its sudden lack of fashion--by the late 1960s status was no longer conferred simply by owning things, however elaborate (or, for that matter, simple). As the Volkswagen foretold, the new status came from being hip and shrewd enough to reject society’s conventional definitions of success. From driving a bug it was only a small jump to finding status by finding yourself. Knowing a good guru--or a reliable drug dealer--became a mark of distinction.

In a remarkably short time, the self-conscious search for self crumbled into indulgence, excess and vanity--the metaphysical equivalent of tail fins. But even after the counterculture cracked up, experiences--as opposed to possessions--endured as barometers of status for a surprisingly broad chunk of the middle class who had never bought into the ideological anti-materialism of the young and stylish. “Essentially through a great deal of the ‘60s and a good part of the ‘70s, people prided themselves on their experiences rather than their possessions--where they ate, where they traveled to,” says Ann Clurman, senior vice president of the polling firm Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. “You had a lot of basic, regular, middle-class people doing this. There would be people who would travel rather than recarpet, which was very different than the traditional standards of the 1950s.”

But by the late 1970s, even as the impulse toward experience took root in the middle class, materialism returned with a vengeance, particularly among the well off. No single date records the beginning of the change, but Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981 marks a good turning point. At once, Jimmy Carter’s cardigans, lowered thermostats and back-country simplicity were replaced with corporate jets, furs, designer dresses, elegant china and a Cabinet full of millionaires. Huge tax cuts followed, the stock market eventually took off, and except for those excluded from the charmed circle--the poor, whose numbers were growing, and the working class, whose incomes were stagnating--the party began.

Advertisement

Once again, the preferred party favors were possessions. This frenzy of unblushing acquisition paralleled the ‘50s, but with an important difference. In the 1950s, everyone seemed to agree on what constituted status. In the 1980s, there is no single ladder of success.

Status has always meant different things to different people. Status varies by class: For a blue-collar worker, a Cadillac might be the ultimate means for getting from here to there. The sort of person who buys a BMW would rather be force fed Velveeta cubes than drive a Cadillac. Different regions value different things too. Now, atop those basic distinctions have been superimposed a kaleidoscopic array of others. “Today, we are not all one culture,” says Harvard sociologist emeritus David Riesman, author of “The Lonely Crowd,” a classic study of the 1950s. “We are very fragmented and fractionated.”

Even simple class distinctions are much more complicated. The baby boomers can be divided into the prototypical yuppies (that small percentage of high-income, urban baby boomers) and their downscale cousins, the so-called New Collars (the huge group that works in gas stations and hospitals and bookkeeping firms). So many people have become affluent that we now must distinguish between the middle class, the upper middle class, the mere millionaire, the multimillionaire, the billionaire and, increasingly, the multibillionaire.

Sociologist Michael Maccoby argues that the urge to keep up with the Joneses, though undiminished, has splintered. Instead of trying to impress its neighbors, the new generation tries to impress its peers, which it may define as a group in the office or a group of friends. What constitutes status varies from group to group; it’s like running a race with no lanes and no finish line.

The 1980s differ from the immediate postwar years in another important way: The half-life of status symbols has shrunk. Under the unblinking glare of the mass media, status symbols today flame up and flame out like misguided rockets. Some things always convey status: homes, lavish vacations, the ability to buy expensive art. But even these enduring artifacts of success bend to swift changes in style, like the movement of the hippest art collectors from modern art to the Old Masters.

At the same time, American culture has become remarkably porous; everything chic finds its way to K mart now (or at least a reasonable knockoff does). For a hot new trend, the arc from discovery at the frontiers of hip in Vanity Fair or Interview magazine to the supermarket rack in Time or Newsweek may be only months, or even weeks. “The way the cachet system works,” says marketing guru Theodore Levitt, editor of the Harvard Business Review, “is it goes from class down to mass, then it becomes crass.” Only a few years ago, sophisticated palates waited in long lines outside exclusive restaurants for blackened redfish. Before you could say Paul Prudhomme, the redfish was in danger of being blackened into extinction and Cajun food corners had been wedged into shopping malls, between the pizza and frozen-yogurt stands, to dish out blackened redfish nuggets on paper plates.

Advertisement

AS THE 1980S RUN DOWN,its desperately acquisitive social climbers have run into a law of status so fundamental that it might as well be carved over the doorway at the California Club. The second rule of status goes like this: Possessions only take you so far.

Marketers make enormous sums selling middle-class people on products that carry a synthesized whiff of money and breeding. But possessions don’t buy your way into higher classes--remember Jay Gatsby? “All the money you might spend on a mansion,” says Richard Coleman, a professor of marketing at Kansas State University, “might only impress the people beneath you.”

The only lasting way for social strivers to advance is through their associations; the most prized form of status in this country, as Coleman notes, remains being accepted by others whose company you covet. Clubs help the socially striving make those connections. Big-time charities help even more; sitting on the board of such institutions as the Music Center or USC still provides a way for people “to be legitimated in a country without knighthood,” Harvard’s Riesman says.

The limits of possessions are now coming clear in another way too. Any of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heroes would have felt right at home in the 1980s, a decade whose cultural foundation seems to have been built on the premise that you can never be too rich or too thin. It hasn’t dawned on everybody on the dance floor yet, but the party may be on its last legs. Some people will say the great binge of the 1980s ended on Black Monday, when the stock market crashed like an addict who finally ran out of cocaine. Culturally, if not economically, “Black Monday was Armageddon,” says marketing consultant Faith Popcorn. “It was a sign from the heavens.” Historians may place the turning point even earlier, on the day in 1986 that federal marshals carted away investment banker Dennis Levine for insider trading, first suggesting that the yuppie dream of the 1980s harbored a greed corrosive enough not only to corrupt but also to destroy. Politically, Levine’s arrest sparked the backlash against the yuppie life style that was a central symbol of status in this decade.

Even among those Levine left behind in the quest for acquisition and arrival, faint twinges of doubt--sort of moral chest pains--have begun intruding. What’s spreading is a realization that while possessions may fill a room, they don’t fill a life. “Money re-emerged in the early 1980s, and there was a great deal of pursuit of that,” says pollster Ann Clurman, “but now there is also a perceived void, a sense that (money) is not enough.” The frantic search for accumulation has left people “hysterical with strain,” says Tina Brown. “Once you’ve got your own plane you’ve got to fly around a lot. All of these people are chartering around America and the world going to places in their plane, when maybe they would like to stay at home. People are very tired by everything they possess.” Exhausted, they’ve made “cocooning”--an ‘80s word for staying home--into a new status symbol.

This cooling of material frenzy would represent a reconnection to our basic values. As a society we have always valued tangible things, sometimes more than others; but at the bedrock level, we’ve always valued less tangible things more. In a Roper poll earlier this year, when asked what constituted success in their eyes, Americans said being a good parent, having a happy marriage, enjoying a happy relationship with another, having friends who respect them, being one of the best at their job. Measures of material affluence finished near the bottom of the list.

Advertisement

For those in its orbit, the pursuit of status is as much a part of life as breathing, often no more calculated and certainly no more avoidable. At every income level, people want to find a way to rise above their neighbors. But the material dreams of most Americans are bracingly modest. In the same poll, when Americans were asked what family income level was needed to fulfill “all their dreams,” they came up with $50,000. That wouldn’t get you in the door of most shops on 5th Avenue or Rodeo Drive. Most people want to shop there, but few seem to sit up nights forlorn because they can’t. Deeper values provide deeper rewards. Even the people who have stocked their closets with Versace suits and traded their Porsches for Ferraris in these go-go years may be coming to see that again. “They found,” says Popcorn, “that the real things in life that they laughed at at the beginning of the decade--family, monogamy, motherhood, marriage, real food even--are the real values.” In the 1990s, status, like charity, may again begin at home.

Advertisement