“It’s the Loro Piana effect and it’s a smoke screen,” said William Norwich, a novelist and editor who, in a previous professional incarnation, had a front-row seat on New York’s moneyed elite as a gossip columnist in the 1980s for The New York Post’s Page Six. “It’s code,” he added. “You telegraph status without seeming to do it.”
And, as trends go, “stealth wealth” was one well suited to a moment in which social media has made us all into de facto voyeurs, noses pressed to the digital window as the grotesquely wealthy flaunt their toys, their cars, their designer fashions, the closets in their 35,000-square-foot Calabasas mansions devoted to Hermès Birkin bags. “We are collectively spending more time checking out what the rich and famous are doing and less time on what Barry from H.R. and Sandra from accounting were up to last weekend,” said Nicholas Bloom, the William D. Eberle professor of economics at Stanford.
We are parsing Veblenesque narratives laid out for us by glossy strangers, people like the supermodel and philanthropist Karlie Kloss, who happens to be married to Josh Kushner — an investor whose stake in onetime start-ups like Instagram, Spotify and Slack yielded a personal fortune estimated at $3.6 billion.
In posts created for the delectation of her 12 million Instagram followers, Ms. Kloss conjures a narrative in which she and her family inhabit a digital empyrean, someplace universes away from the paycheck-to-paycheck worries of hoi polloi. In Kushner-Kloss world, the light is always honeyed, air travel quietly private and human and divine seemingly will converge somewhere in the Grenadines aboard the poop deck of the billionaire David Geffen’s humongous Lürssen yacht, Rising Sun.
“Wealth porn,” Stellene Volandes, editor in chief of Town & Country, termed such postings. And as with any permutation of adult entertainment, it’s free online: Anyone can watch.
Things were not always thus. Back in the remote Reagan ’80s, also an era of unbridled wealth creation, opulent status display may have been occasionally grotesque (think birthday parties for 500 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur), and yet they were far less visible to the general public. Hedge fund moguls, predacious leveraged-buyout kings and real estate tycoons competed shamelessly to out-party, out-dress and out-spend one another, mounting lavish entertainments for “Champagne-swilling, caviar-supping, Lacroix-wearing” guests, as The New York Times once noted. Yet their excesses were noted by a relative few.