Hard Times for the Status-Minded

By Frank Trippett

He may never have been a Galileo of the social firmament, but as a journalist Vance Packard is clear-eyed enough to have seen, before anybody else, that the post-World War II U.S. had got caught up in a compulsive competition for status. The proof came in The Status Seekers (1959), a dissection of those Americans who, as the author put it, were "continually straining to surround themselves with visible evidence of the superior rank they are claiming." Since that happened to include just about the entire U.S. population, the great status game, once focused, provoked a great many fears that it would damage the egalitarian ideal and hasten the evolution of sharp class lines. What none of the fearful saw was that, given the services of mass production and sustained prosperity, universal chasing after prestige would engender such a gorgeous and gaudy muddle of status symbols as to reduce the game to farce--which it has now plainly become.

Status in its diverse forms still exists, no doubt, and many an American is still out there grabbing after some of it. What makes the spectacle ridiculous now is that, except in rare cases, people who have latched onto some status cannot be sure of how to flash the news to the world, and people who are watching cannot be sure who is dramatizing what sort of status with what symbol. Order Gucci loafers and you only risk winding up shod the same way as the boy who delivers them. A Cadillac today signifies nothing about the owner except that he might well pull in at the next Burger King. Incontrovertibly, any game has been seriously maimed when you can no longer tell who is winning or losing. The status game had surely begun to turn absurd as soon as the man in the gray flannel suit began turning up in denim and sneakers--with no loss of prestige. The absurdity had clearly become utter by the year now ending: it was the year in which the President of the U.S. had to resort to the jelly bean for a symbol that set him apart from other folks.

The present symbolic muddle is enough to make one nostalgic for the good old days when everybody imagined that he could peg a person's status with only a few facts about the subject's clothes, schooling, job, neighborhood and car. The days when everybody enjoyed the habit of looking at all the artifacts of civilized existence as though they were primarily badges of rank. The days when elitist Middle Americans casually sneered at fellow citizens who lived in suburban split-level houses--which only a Rockefeller could afford today. Inflation is just one of the things that undermined the great status chase. The prior years of sustained prosperity contributed to the same end--giving people of middling status possession of most of the fashions and products (luxury gadgetry, stereos, color TV sets) that only the well-heeled could afford formerly. Then, too, the cultural conniptions of the 1960s and '70s helped subvert the rules of the status game; hell-raising youth provided adult Americans with (besides headaches) liberating proof that it is possible to have a good time while disdaining conventional symbols.

So many of the game's players, as well as its symbols, have changed. Many Americans have lost interest in status showing off, as is handily deduced from a Wall Street Journal headline of this very season: MOST BOSSES SHUN SYMBOLS OF STATUS. Other Americans have taken to picking their symbols to reflect values other than social rank. In The New Elite, out this year, David Lebedoff reports that professional and artistic Americans have begun shrugging aside the traditional symbols of economic rank. Says Lebedoff: "They can't afford them, so they downplay them.

A mink coat at a faculty party is a disaster." Another social critic, John Brooks, suggests (in Showing Off in America; From Conspicuous Consumption to Parody Display, published last summer) that people are undermining the traditional status competition by mocking it. Says Brooks, for instance, of those who sport so-called high-tech decor in their homes: "They flaunt commercial and industrial objects to prove that they don't have to be serious about such matters."

The confusion of the U.S. status race has been abetted by, among all else, the widespread adulteration of the very idea of the status symbol. The phrase has long since been stretched into an all-purpose label that gets promiscuously stuck on things that symbolize not status but mere fashion and faddishness. Even those graffiti-stamped T shirts that have had such a long, hot run of popularity have been called status symbols. Nonsense. If such garments symbolize status, it is surely the entire spectrum of status, high and low; the same can be said for those ubiquitous sports shirts with little alligators on the chest.

Careless use of the phrase tells just how frequently the meaning of status is overlooked by ostensible status auditors. Status is not merely rank, but rank within a hierarchy of esteem or prestige. The accouterments of style and fashion do not always or even usually amount to symbols of status. A privately owned yacht still symbolizes high financial status, but Sperry Top Siders--now worn by landlubbers of all varieties--no longer symbolize the status of yachtsman as they once did. Initialed handbags of the Louis Vuitton sort signaled uppering status in the days when people spoke of "going abroad"; now such bags have been so replicated that they represent little but the exhaustion of pop imagery. A VW Rabbit driven by a rich man dramatizes not status but conservation chic, in the same way that the now popular pickup truck, in the hands of suburbanites, is a symbol not of rank but of utilitarian chic. Some observers speak of solar heating panels as the new status symbols, but these devices do not dramatize social standing nearly as much as a philosophic (and economic) attitude. Those beepers that summon people to unseen telephones? Years ago, when they were rare, beepers emanated some prestige, but today, in profusion, they signal little but duty.

The status show, old style, still trudges on, to be sure, but it is most noticeable nowadays among the rich and most amusing to notice in Washington, which displays in concentration the social mode that reflects the country's ascendant mood. Says Diana McClellan, who closely monitors the status chase as the Washington Post gossip columnist: "There's more of a polarization now between the really rich and everybody else. These people are plastered with rubies and things to the point where you don't think you've got a chance. How can you hope to top $700,000 worth of Bulgari jewels around somebody's neck? You don't--you give up and go with plastic Scottie dogs or something."

Status, as notion or fact, is inseparable from the human condition. Given the nature of the U.S. as an open society cherishing the premise that anybody is free to rise, a good deal of status chasing was inescapable from the outset. If the chase had indeed rigidified the lines of class in the society, the symbols of status could only have become ever more clear. Reflecting upon that fact, one contemplates the present symbolic (and hierarchical) muddle with a light heart. --By Frank Trippett

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