The second chapter continues the examination of class aspiration, but this time from the point of view of those entering the middle and upper-middle classes. Here government policies of affirmative action and Black Economic Empowerment have borne fruit for some. But the benefits of these policies come with strings attached, for the workplace is often experienced as hostile and unwelcoming. Life in the suburbs, even for the nouveau riche, can be alienating. The key texts studied in this chapter, aided by a wealth of ethnography in this area, are popular romances (Sapphire Press, Nollybooks) and ‘chick lit’ (Zukiswa Wanner, Cynthia Jele) aimed at black female South Africans. These texts, it is argued, serve a self-help function, negotiating shifting structures of identity along with changes in lifestyle, affiliation, values and meanings.

This chapter proposes a triadic framework that offers a fresh lens on recent advances in luxury consumption at three distinct levels. First, we review broad systemic forces shaping the contours of the “luxury space” which governs the extent to which certain types of items and practices become more (or less) tightly associated with status over time. Second, we discuss strategies and tactics that firms use to enter the luxury space and make their offerings more appealing within that space. Third, we turn to individual-level dynamics that guide how consumers engage in, internalize, and respond to luxury consumption. We then suggest that integrating these three levels of forces – systemic, firm-level, and individual-level – can inform future research on luxury consumption. While the bulk of research to date has examined how these forces influence individual consumers and their luxury consumption, we propose that focusing on how forces at different levels interact to shape one another may offer promising opportunities for future work in the area.

Conspicuous consumption and display were central to the Residents’ representational strategies at court. Britons in India are often assumed to have dismissed gift-giving as mere bribery and regarded regal pageantry as empty spectacle; in fact, the opposite is true. Residents were very aware of the symbolism of gifts and their efficacy at securing relationships both vertically and horizontally; this awareness is clearly manifest in their efforts to monitor and regulate these exchanges at court. The attempt on the part of the Company to impose a rigid, contractual framework on gift-giving was therefore not a sign of ignorance or disregard, nor was it simply an attempt to preclude corruption at court. By situating these debates within wider disagreements about the Residents’ expense claims, it becomes clear that there were other, more abstract issues at stake. These squabbles about money were a product of ambivalent attitudes about conspicuous consumption and display and reflect serious differences of opinion regarding the basis of the Company’s legitimacy in India.

The 2019 college admissions bribery scandal revealed uncomfortable truths about elite higher education and its conspicuous consumption. In this chapter, I explore the legal implications of treating higher education as a luxury good reflecting wealth and status. Like luxury goods companies, elite universities are regarded as owners of luxury brands. Just as companies such as Louis Vuitton, Ferrari, and Hermès own brands that enjoy a high level of exclusivity and serve conspicuous consumption, so too do elite universities. In the minds of many, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale are analogous to Louis Vuitton, Ferrari, and Hermès. This “luxurification” of higher education, however, perpetuates class division and violates the right to education.

Chapter 3 examines post-1873 depression-era Ottoman novels and plays that articulate a language of difference by juxtaposing the success of industrious heroes against the failure of consumerist dandy anti-heroes. The representation of industrious and dandy characters in fin-de-siècle Istanbul shows the interconnectedness and interdependence between novels and the discourses and practices of productivity, in sharing the same new moral universe. Differing from the normative and distant language of the morality authors, or the authoritative and punitive language of the bureaucratic reforms explored in Chapters 1 and 2, the playful voices of novelists displayed dynamic and at times ambivalent representations of the idle and dandy, as an alternate, yet socially undesirable form of self-fashioning. By pitting a hardworking and upwardly mobile hero against the dandy anti-hero, novels thematized the period’s concern with valuing work as a constitutive element of character and nation-building, and also drew boundaries that defined who was and was not included in the nation. As a forum in which citizenship was debated, fiction established difference using ridicule, marginalization, and even criminalization as a social intervention.

The chapter opens with a discussion of the methodological challenges involved in the study of a society for which we have very few contemporary literary sources, before exploring the dynamic intersections of wealth and power in archaic Rome with special attention to changes over time, primarily on the basis of archaeological evidence. The discussion considers the noticeable shift in the display of wealth from funerary settings to housing, stimulated by the introduction of the census; limits on the degree of ostentation on the part of rich and powerful members of the archaic Roman community; and protection against the dissipation of patrimony. In the final part, the focus shifts to the lower end of the social spectrum with a reconstruction of the lifestyle of a typical Roman farmer in the archaic period, with particular reference to calorific needs and allotment size.