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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 décor 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.