Look rich quick

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We are excited to announce that Michelle Santiago Cortés is joining Dirt for the next three months as a contributing writer as Terry Nguyen moves into a contributing editor role!

Michelle Santiago Cortés is a freelancer who writes about life online and youth culture, mostly for The Cut (and now Dirt!). Before that she was at Refinery29. In addition to writing about art and technology she is a fan of: seaweed, rocks, and art books.

Today, Michelle examines how aesthetics like “old money” and “quiet luxury” are stylistic dupes.

Bridget is excited to attend an elite Manhattan party. Marble floors, chandeliered parlors, and stunning park views set the scene as guests mill about, picking champagne flutes off the silver trays floating by. She can’t wait to tell the world where she is and who she is with. Bridget asks the female guests, most of them in modest jewelry and subtle makeup, how much things cost. She double-fists canapés and gawks at her surroundings whenever her date steps away. Bridget is at Logan Roy’s birthday party as the date of Cousin Greg, in the first episode of Succession’s final season.

“You’ve made an enormous faux pas,” Tom Wambsgans, a Midwestern native and son of a lawyer, tells Greg, the youngest of the Roys. “Everyone is laughing up their sleeves about your date,” and her “ludicrously capacious bag.” The way Tom sees it, Greg has made himself “the laughing stock of polite society.” Adding: “You will never go to the opera again!”

This tirade is less about the actual bag’s merits as a design object and more to do with why Tom thinks Bridget chose that bag. That Bridget was naïve enough to think a nearly $3,000 bag could advance whatever misguided social-climbing agenda brought her to that party in the first place. Even if it was Burberry, a respectable British heritage label, the bag was “monstrous” and “gargantuan.” It was too loud, too obvious, and too new. If only Bridget was on TikTok, where she could learn all about the aesthetics that define the way that truly wealthy people dress.

Bridget is just a minor character on a prestige TV show, but her imagined ambitions and anxieties are the same ones that have turned rich-people cosplay into an enduring social media phenomenon. Because this is, for the most part, a conversation had on TikTok, it is a conversation led by members of Generation Z. For the past two years, the internet’s many fashion subcultures have sought to ascribe specific terms to the ways rich people dress: “old money,” “stealth wealth,” and “quiet luxury” being just three of these monikers.

Since late 2021, mainstream media has been writing about the rise and dominance of the old money aesthetic on visual social media. The women featured in these mood boards are (or look like) Charlotte Yorke and Carolyn Kennedy; their preferred mode of dress is “classic,” “preppy,” or to be more precise: “WASP-y,” emphasis on the W. The old money aesthetic is a romanticized understanding of the past and how the wealthy once dressed.

An adjacent trend, “stealth wealth” or “quiet luxury” has its own fantasies about how rich people shop and dress today. The emphasis on craftsmanship and materials implies that wearing neutrals and avoiding logos conveys a certain discernment—that you are too smart and rich to shop based on branding alone. This is the romanticized present and, in a sense, more insidious. We can trace the roots of this manner of dress back a few decades, sported by members of the “self-made” billionaires of the tech elite. There were probes into Mark Zuckerberg’s gray hoodies and praise for Steve Jobs’ Issey Miyake turtleneck. Today, the style circles around the affluent murmurs of Loro Piana and Brunello Cucinelli as worn, perhaps most recognizably, by the fictional characters of Succession.

The basic premise of all these trends is that the rich are too smart, too wealthy, and too snobby to display their wealth through visible logos and recognizable designs. The way they dress is ruled by codes more complex and more discreet than the unpedigreed eye can perceive. True wealth doesn’t just whisper, it speaks a secret language.

Gen Z is not unique in expressing such an impassioned interest in the ways of the rich. They’re just the first youth cohort to actively document this obsession online and encode “wealth” into trends and aesthetics they can easily emulate. “Old money” and “quiet luxury” are really just stylistic dupes; we imagine that affluent people dress like that. They are interpretations, not re-creations.

How we shop has always been part of a greater process of self-invention: We build the selves others see through the things we buy. Mass media—from magazines to television to social media—has made it possible for specific consumer goods to become emblematic across huge swaths of the population. This has turned specific designs, like a “nondescript” baseball cap or an unfortunately-sized bag, into widely legible symbols. Enter the dupe: The dupe lowers the barrier to entry for anyone, anywhere, to add any design to the lexicon of their wardrobe. On TikTok, dupes don’t even have to be dupes of anything in particular. They just have to make us feel like we’re getting some kind of deal.

In duping the (albeit, imagined) logic of how the rich dress—“classic,” logo-free, and craft-driven—we are also (I’ll assume unwittingly) duping the ways they extract and exploit. Middle-class consumers, as a result, are adopting the affluent's sense of entitlement. If the rich are entitled to overstuffed closets with luxury goods, why can't the rest of us have nice things? We deserve the dupes.

Last August, Mirror Palais’s Maria dress was at the center of what I’ll ambitiously call TikTok’s biggest dupe controversy. Mirror Palais is a brand sustained on pre-orders. Every dress is designed and crafted in New York, and the Maria is made using 100% cotton and 100% silk trim. The dress’s name recalls an image of an itinerant socialite, eating stone fruit under the Tuscan sun, barefoot. She can certainly afford the $625 dress, even though most of us can’t. That didn’t stop commenters on TikTok from saying things like: “Would be so slay of you to make it around 12 hours of minimum wage shift price range.”

Dupes for the Maria dress began popping up everywhere on Shein and Amazon. Like any in-demand dupe, it became currency for in-the-know influencers and shoppers to brag about. The dupe itself went viral. (Finding a good dupe is like digging for gold and pulling out a fat lump of pyrite.)

Amid the frenzy, Mirror Palais designer Marcelo Gaia said that he felt weirdly implicated. The demand for dupes of his own ethically-made design contributed to the exploitation of garment workers outside of his control. In the same TikTok, he dueted @meeandminnie, who explained it more succinctly: “Our urge to find a dupe for absolutely everything has us in a fucking chokehold.” Suddenly, the dupe is burdened with the work of helping shoppers look and feel rich. It also renders the wealth gap inconsequential (at least when it comes to retail), while burdening those who are tasked with making everyone’s clothes.

@mirrorpalais

@meeandminnie your video made me smile. We have to consider the people who are making these clothes. If you’re paying 10 dollars for a dre... See more

Some proponents of “old money aesthetic” and “stealth wealth” (the Wambsgans of the world) believe that learning these sartorial codes will help them climb their way up the social hierarchy—if not by looking rich, then by showing off their rich-people-values. Dress for the job or the status you want! If you look and act the part, the right multi-millionaire or billionaire might add you to his will. But most young people don’t style themselves after the “old money” aesthetic with this rare hope in mind. Rather, they are harvesting the ways of the rich for stylistic components to incorporate into their own wardrobes. In this sense, these aesthetics are a lot like early British dandyism, an 18th and 19th century affect of art and personal style that emphasized “less is more” luxury. This harvesting has also been a crucial building block of youth-driven subcultures like glam rock, the New Romantics, and whatever the fuck Harry Styles is doing.

“These are costumes, not fashion,” Michelle Matland, costume designer for Succession, told the Washington Post. “So it’s very interesting that they become fashion,” she says in response to the #quietluxury movement. This game of fashion codes can make for entertaining trends, useful shorthands, or even creative premises for getting dressed in the morning. The dupe is American in its fantasy of upward mobility and its effects on the ways people shop. Some dupes enable our vilest consumer habits by providing a near-endless supply of items for our rich-people cosplay, all at the expense of people and the environment. But other dupes give us the tools to play around with the wares of the rich, to eat away at the tools they use to set themselves apart and make them sweat it out.

Dapper Dan is a perfect example of this role-reversal. Since the late 80s, Dapper Dan has been a household name in fashion specifically because of the power of his dupes. Daniel Day (better known as Dapper Dan) owned and operated his famous boutique on Harlem’s 125th street. The self-described “criminal and hustler” turned years of window-breaking, professional gambling, and selling stolen designer goods into a booming street style brand known for its literal counterfeits of brands like Fendi, Louis Vuitton, MCM, and Gucci. His Dapper Dan’s Boutique was open 24/7. There, his logomanic bootlegs dressed hip hop legends like Salt-N-Pepa and LL Cool J.

Dapper Dan’s influence cannot be overstated: He didn’t just make knockoffs, he made knockoffs that threatened the fashion establishment. His dupes got him sued out of business in the ‘90s and hired by Gucci in 2017. Legacy fashion houses have yet to fully repay their debt to him, because his knockoffs of their products showed them the untapped potential of their designs.

“The label is everything,” he told the New York Times, “the label is the thing the gangster clientele use to let other gangsters in the street know, ‘you ain’t got what I got.’ The label or the logo sets you apart.” One thing dupes can do reliably is tell those around—not above—us, who we want to be.

Dapper Dan’s subversive dupes see luxury for what it actually is: labels, names, brands, designs—all symbols. Both “old money” and “quiet luxury” have become so pervasive that they have slowly spun off into their own subcultures. Yes, some participants value vertical social mobility and recognition from elites, but we shouldn’t neglect the peer-to-peer (horizontal) exchanges at play here. The styles of the rich are just raw material. What matters is if your friends and followers can tell you’re going for Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy or Princess Diana.

The Dirt: Wealthy people's culture is our costume.

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