When I’m not spending my eight-block journeys to the subway letting scream-heavy post-punk keep me from lying down in despair, I spend them compulsively adding up the retail value of every piece of clothing and jewelry I’m wearing. If the grand total is greater than a month’s rent, I feel luxurious, even when the wind makes my bones chatter. My shamble turns to a stride. I don’t need anyone around me to know how much my outfit cost, but a sense of security comes with knowing how much I could shell out for the clothes I adore. Ever since I obliterated my savings account to buy a ring with the excuse that some people my age are having children or snorting coke so I should be allowed my own stupid decisions, all it takes is a nice pair of jeans or my ROC boots to make a rent-money outfit.
The algorithmically fucked dregs of TikTok that is Instagram Reels has recently coughed up some advice for me: dozens of videos, almost entirely from young women, telling me “How to look expensive on a budget.” Sometimes, they’re up front: “How to look rich on a budget”; usually, they say “expensive.” The tips don’t vary much. The women wear simple, restrained outfits: tight-fitting white tops with dress pants or black skirts that hit somewhere above the knee without being too short. These creators instruct their viewers to wear neutral colors, not to wear clothing that is too revealing, not to wear too much perfume or makeup. Fashioning yourself in excess antagonizes wealth’s quiet “refinement” (even if they never clarify what’s “too much”).
Amela Linen Top from Reformation; retail: $148
Amazon’s Belle Poque Ladies 1950s Scottish Vintage Single Breasted Vest Sleeveless Vest; retail: $17.27
Essentiel Antwerp jeans; retail: $330
Cider Denim Low Rise Rhinestone Jeans; retail: $47.90
The one area you don’t have to hold back is accessories. Outfits are finished with layers of jewelry that, the creators brag, is pinched from Amazon or Shein or another brand someone has probably told you to boycott. These videos work in tandem with a slew of other content that compares expensive pieces of clothing to their cheap, fast-fashion counterparts. What if a $6 floral dress from Walmart or Temu looks no different than the $160 floral dress from Reformation? Viewers are meant to feel cheated when they can’t tell the difference, like they’re victims of the more ethical brands.
These videos are presented as practical tips, but they aren’t made for people trying to look rich walking to the train offline. In person, people can tell if your skirt was made from a transparently thin layer of polyester and held together with anemic stitches; but through a phone screen, it doesn’t matter if the whole outfit will have disintegrated by the time someone sees it. To keep up the ruse, all you have to do is stay online. It may take polyester centuries longer to break down than natural fibers, but its wearable lifetime is scarcely as long as a 21st-century trend cycle. There’s no space for questions of texture, of a garment’s literal richness, in these digital closets — and no time before these garments become unwearable garbage.
When viral personal branding glows above us as the most viable series of rungs up the warping ladder toward late-capitalist success, maybe we are always the product.
“Looking expensive.” The phrase itself perturbs me. It might seem like a less desperate synonym for “looking rich.” But at least “looking rich” implies personhood: A person can be rich. To “be expensive” means dressing like you would be found in an Hermès outlet and not dropped from an Amazon drone. The term commodifies the wearer, seemingly of their own volition – how else do you win the game of online curation? If you don’t know what you’re being sold, you are the product. When viral personal branding glows above us as the most viable series of rungs up the warping ladder toward late-capitalist success, maybe we are always the product; anything we do buy is merely the means to capitalize ourselves. And like anything we try to sell for a profit, we need to make those commercial selves as cheaply as possible.
An infatuation with simplicity has made us forget the distinction between sophisticated restraint and dystopian blandness, as well as the distinctions between ourselves. These videos’ creators sell themselves as a blueprint for the viewer: become an identical product to them, and maybe you’ll look expensive enough to gain your own audience, to whom you can profess the same wisdom. Proceed until we’re all cheap fakes in matching beige-tissue-paper mini skirts and loafers whose soles would detach if they touched asphalt.
And if a fake aura of wealth doesn’t suit you? Then be the kind of individual fashion demands – and invest! Living forever is the internet’s other greatest obsession of late – and even if your own face doesn’t last, at least your favorite second skin will.
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