Word: veblen
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...every ex-schoolboy has probably forgotten, Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase "conspicuous consumption" after examining the untaxed sachems of the Gilded Age, their mansions, yachts, gargantuan dinner parties and cyclopean stickpins. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Veblen did not hide his disdain for such display. He belonged to an era of sociology before it married computer science, bred statistics and headed for the neutral horizons of market research...
Brooks calls this "parody display." His most obvious example is blue jeans, first mass-produced by Levi Strauss in the 19th century as cheap, durable work pants. This had nothing to do with Veblen's view of fashion as a weapon in class conflict. But when worn faded and threadbare by college students in the next century, a pah" of Levi's flashed the word that one was secure enough to dress like an underpaid ranch hand. The parody was enriched when grimy denims became the uniform of unemployed hippies, and the current irony is that designer jeans...
...WORST "fashion statement' is the plaid skirt, which asserts the wearer's class superiority and gender inferiority. Preppie culture has always been patriarchal. Thorstein Veblen, who coined the phrase "conspicuous consumption" at the turn of the century, contended that the leisure class woman's function was to display-her male keeper's wealth. "The high heel, the skirt...and the general disregard of the wearer's comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized women's apparel" suggested to Veblen that "the woman is still in theory the economic dependent of the man." Despite changes since Veblen...
...nature, a greyhound aficionado, and had it not been for reading period I might never have ridden the blue line ten stops out to Wonderland last Friday night. The search for heady adventure had seized me. Saying "damn" to my 600-page portable Veblen, I took off for the tracks in fine, Kerouac fashion. I even managed to talk this friend of mine into coming, a guy who had an exam on Marx the next morning...
Thorstein Veblen would have been proud last Saturday night when WGBH-TV, the Cambridge Public Broadcasting System affiliate, auctioned off the distinctive purple-and-gold 1976 Cadillac Eldorado convertible that the Harvard Lampoon last year awarded John Kenneth Galbraith, Warburg Professor of Economics Emeritus...