Dress for Success

...in the second Gilded Age

In 1975, the former prep school teacher John T. Molloy published an enormously influential guide for the act of seeming upper-middle-class: Dress for Success, a book that would be used in executive training programs throughout the 1980s. Good grooming, gray and blue suits (not salmon pink, for crying out loud), a firm step with the arms held in a posture of confidence: the look of the elite, of the people who run things. Molloy taught the uniform, the look and pose of a status group, for people who wished to appear to be members of that group – with the hope of actually becoming members. Jon Hamm spent several years playing this social process on television.

There’s still an elite uniform, but there’ve been some changes. Take this person, for example:

That’s Ella Emhoff, the expensively educated child of privilege who is now the stepdaughter of the Vice-President of the United States. Because of her elegance and sophistication, she models for top fashion designers. No, really.

Ella has the appearance of a young member of the higher end of the contemporary American upper-middle-class, an affluent child of a corporate lawyer who climbed a full rank. Looking the way she does, she conveys her elite status. She doesn’t need to be taught how to dress for success; she was born that way, and carries the pose with ease.

Meanwhile, here’s the CEO of a powerful American media company:

He used to look like this:

…but then he achieved success, and transitioned to a fully upper-class appearance.

Just as the emotional posture of woundedness conveys status, the look of a sad sack in the higher social ranks is the product of an age of centralized wealth, mimetic-credentialed status, and widespread social decline. Affluenza has a dress code.

In an endless stream of coded messages, we tell our most privileged people that they should look like victims, like they’re hurt and disgusted, like they hate privilege and can’t stand having it. Go to Oberlin or Williams or Stanford so you can learn to reject your privilege, you see.

It’s precisely the way we’ve taught them to protect their privilege.

Affluenza is neurasthenia reborn. We’ve taught our born-on-third-basers and our front row kids to pose down, to berate the help by couching the Leona Helmsley act in the pose of victimhood. It’s the social-media-world update on 19th-century corporate families taking the healing waters at luxury resorts to address their pain.

Trauma: it’s a lifestyle product.