“We met at Starbucks. Not at the same Starbucks but we saw each other at different Starbucks across the street from each other.”

When Paul Fussell wrote his 1983 book “Class: A Guide Through the American Class System” he was touching on one of the last great taboos in American society : social class. And while a lot has changed since 1983 - like, a lot a lot, so much so that many of his ideas seem hopelessly outdated - his writing remains deeply relevant in one important sense - that while class in America is a forbidden topic, it's nonetheless profoundly established. It's one of the key decisive factors of an American life trajectory, and our mouths are clamped shut, it remains starkly visible to the eyes.

The true beauty of Fussell’s work lies in its Bourdieuian approach, a subtle work-around that spares a reader the stress of real economic analysis. For Fussell, class is a set of behaviors and a series of purchases. It’s a system that’s comforting in its simplicity. He’s basically arguing that social class isn’t financial, it’s “read” through a system of signs. You don’t need to look at someone’s bank statement to guess their social class, you can see it by the kind of tie they’re wearing.

It’s precisely that read of things - that series of signifiers - that makes the 2000 mockumentary film Best in Show so hilarious. Oh yes, oh yes. I recently rewatched Best in Show for the first time in a long time and it hit me so hard over the head that I had to Google this topic to make sure there weren’t already like 170 things on the Internet about this. I’m not entirely unconvinced that Best in Show isn’t actually a film adaptation of Class.

Social class is never overtly mentioned as a theme in the film, but it’s the central thread that makes it funny. Because it feels to me like the whole game is taking a bunch of people who wouldn’t normally show up at a dog show and sticking them in one; they’re not personalities, they’re archetypes. You know by what they wear, by their jobs, by the way they speak.

(Honestly maybe those are all Dog Show People, I wouldn’t know. I always kind of imagined them all as the breeder played by Jane Lynch, but maybe I’m confusing Dog People with Horse People. I come from Llama People, that’s Fussell’s Class X if I ever saw it.)

In some strange way, it takes Fussell’s work (a very narrow, caricatural, out-moded analysis of class in America) and it reminds us that there’s still some relevance to it. Social class feels like a less and less relevant tool of consumer behavior study in a world where mass consumption of small consumer goods is largely democratized. Which is not to say that buying power has somehow miraculously evened-out, or that everyone has equal access to the wonders of the Golden Age.

Rather, what we buy has become increasingly democratized, particularly in terms of dress. Gone the days of judging a man by his tie. It’s the great Internet Equalizer, we’re all wearing jeans and Stans now. Also, from a distance, you cannot tell the difference between high-end and low-end denim, don’t lie to me. Put otherwise, class remains a good indicator of consumer behavior, but I think it would be more difficult to call it a predictor.

I think that’s why Best in Show is so fun for me - because, as exaggerated as it is, it’s an important reminder that we’re still reading people. They’re archetypes, sure, but they’re recognizable. If you get the jokes, if you totally know those people (or don’t), it’s because you’re able to understand a series of signs and signifiers, of subtle little tics like dropping your g’s or memorizing an L.L.Bean catalog. It’s the Starter Pack meme in a movie. Maybe social class is no longer the most relevant tool for studying consumerism, but it’s a reminder that we exist, inescapably, in a visually legible class context.

In one of several appendices, Fussell is kind enough to provide a quiz for the curious reader, anxious to position himself on the ladder (although if you are anxious, according to Fussell, there’s no need. We already know you’re middle class). Go through your living room and award yourself points for the items you see. +5 points for a piano, -3 points for a white lacquer baby grand. +3 points for any of the following magazines on your coffee table: The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the Smithsonian. +1 point for National Geographic. -1 point for Reader’s Digest.

There’s an obvious bias for the upper class - Fussell makes a good analysis but doesn’t seem to quite escape that overtly snobbish preference for what good ol’ PB would refer to as an accumulation of embodied and objectified cultural capital. He devotes a lot of time to something called “Prole Drip” or “Slide” or something that implies that everything good must eventually become ~sullied~ by the hands of the lower echelons. I don't know, it was 1983. Academic standards were different.

Best in Show provides us with a class study not unlike Fussell’s appendix. And it so happens that I have a favorite couple in this film, my golden example: the Weimaraner people (Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock).

Let us study the Weimaraner people. They embody SO perfectly a Fussellian archetype that I smell conspiracy. Meg and Hamilton are a late 90’s yuppie couple, which is explained to us in the opening scene by a series of key tells : obsessed with coffee culture and Starbucks in particular, law school, THEY MEMORIZED THE J CREW CATALOG, therapy… the entire joke comes from the discussion of their consumer decisions, and the really great part is that they’re doing it on purpose.

It’s the conspicuous consumption of the middle class, the anxiety of “slipping down a rung” as Fussell would put it. Fussell is brutal about this, and rightly so - conspicuous consumption gets brought up in discussions of poverty, but it’s almost at its strongest in the middle-upper middle class. You are L.L.Bean people, and therefore, you are. It’s your NPR tote bag and your Ivy League bumper sticker. It’s reading The Atlantic and humble-bragging about it. Ah yes, fanning it out on your coffee table might get you taken down a rung. It’s the constant references to Starbucks, in the late 90’s, or like Soulcycle or Whole Foods or whatever the fuck today. Meg has braces in the film, I think for Fussell, it would not be impossible for her to have grown up poor and be seeking to establish herself on the class rung. No one, according to Fussell, is having less fun in this game of signs than the middle class.

Unlike Fussell, however, Best in Show doesn’t spare the upper class. They’re ridiculed along with everyone else - out of touch, old-fashioned. And at the end of the day, despite all their advantages, they’re not the ones to walk away with a prize-winning show dog. It’s the Norwich terrier who takes it all in a stunning upset at the end. It’s the couple who couldn’t pay for their hotel room, who’d maxed out a few credit cards, who lived in Florida, who bleached their hair and had a nickname like “Cookie”. They’re unpretentious, and like Fussell’s counterparts, seem to be both aware of their position on the ranks and unconcerned about it. (In the sense, according to Fussell, that they’d be less anxious about class positioning than the middle class. I’m not saying I agree.)

So, in the end, class and rank isn’t quite the predictor that we’d imagined it to be - both in the film and in reflecting on Fussell’s work 30-something years later. If it seems out-of-touch, irrelevant, narrow, that’s because it is. It’s overwhelmingly white, for one, not unlike Best in Show. It’s a world where upper-class meant preppy. There’s no intersectionality. It’s long lost its use as a sociological text, but it remains a fun romp. It’s pure fluff, not unlike Best in Show. It remains, much like the film, a fun game of personalities. Exaggerated though they may be.

Whatever those items used to symbolize for the consumer (wealth, sexiness, power) can be obtained in other ways, and represented better by other, immaterial means. Those narratives that give luxury its power today are all the more adaptable once liberated from the physical. This already the principle of branding today - a brand isn't an object, it's an idea; it's what allows a brand to adapt and reinvent itself in a changing market. So it's not that the product itself will ever fall completely to the wayside. But the physical details that make luxury what it is will lose some of their seductive power.

Who needs, say, a couture dress when you can pay for a Premium, Exclusive, Better, More Comfortable Experience? In an age where Louis Vuitton is no longer a product – no longer a trunk, or a bag – then those physical items become mere pieces of a larger Louis Vuitton Experience puzzle. Forget the lightly tethered associative relationship created by sponsorships – why not a LV concert, or cruise, or voyage? A business model that holds up a superior object as a core tenet seems less pertinent in a world that’s hardly concerned with objects at all.  

All of this is not to say that I think that luxury itself is going anywhere. The desire for something better, something above hasn’t and won’t go away. Just like that old axiom about marketing, technology doesn’t create needs, it responds to them. That need is clearly still present, perhaps even more so. In a world where self-differentiation is so powerful and accessible, it makes sense to need more powerful tools to do the job. But I do think that luxury is about to face its next great challenge – in the future, if you’re going to pay for something truly great, I don’t think it will necessarily be a physical product.

It’s an excellent, excellent tagline.

Interestingly, it’s also very inclusive, and in a way, patriotic. I think an argument to be made for the use of English in advertisements is that it makes them more accessible to an increasing population of non-native French speakers; it allows new arrivals and tourists and those born speaking French to participate in mass culture on an equal level.

It’s also one of the few examples of the French Girl ™ myth that doesn’t assume a white francaise de souche, as does the L’Oréal ad. (Aren’t you just shocked to know that French Girl Hair is brown, straight, and untextured?). It doesn’t define her as a wealthy Parisian. Nor does it find her in a beret and a marnière, poutily smoking a cigarette on a café terrasse. Or even drinking alcohol, for that matter. For Etam, being French is not limited to a particular look.

While the ads do overwhelmingly (maybe exclusively?) feature white women, there’s an implied linguistic inclusivity otherwise rarely present in similar advertising. It’s perhaps not a mistake that the only word in French is liberté, so effortlessly translated to speakers of other languages. What is truly French, in this ad, is a Republican ideal, and it’s available to everyone (free with purchase of Etam product).

This is relatively radical for France, a country recently in the news when its Ambassador to the US accused TV host Trevor Noah of racism for congratulating Africa on winning the World Cup. And while as an American I understand - and agree with - Noah’s sentiment, I think an important context key was missing to that debate.

In France, it’s still not a given that someone who’s not white, culturally Catholic, and français de souche is French. When Noah gave his reply - about how everyone who’s a “good immigrant” is French and everyone who’s not is just “an immigrant”  - he was 100% accurate. The Ambassador was saying something that many French still need to hear, which nonetheless seems intuitive to (most) Americans:  if you’re born here, or you uphold the values of liberté, egalité, fraternité, you’re French. End of story.

And, in a global cultural context in which French Girls ™ are thin, white Parisians, it seems welcomely progressive for a brand to declare that what gets you membership in that exclusive club isn’t your hair type, it’s participating in those values (via purchase). And that’s exactly why it’s such a great ad. Because embrace liberté and you, too, can be French.

But it’s interesting to me that this is the value that they chose, that for Etam, France in the eye of the Other equals liberty and, of course, sexual liberation. It’s funny because it also seems like a certain revindication of power. This is not necessarily the symbol French Girls ™ represent for the Internet (although this does very much exist); nor is the French Girl ™ here an object that exists as the counterfoil for American puritanism. Rather, it’s the French Girl ™ narrative written by and for French women, modeled in the image of their own mythologies.

It’s part of a trend, I think, in the reclaiming of the French Girl ™ by French women themselves. I’m thinking of in particular of the book How to be Parisian Wherever You Are, which I… do not like at all, largely because I think it’s simplistic, cliché, and dissuades women from wearing sweatpants in front of men, including their gym teachers (I KNOW.)

The book was an international success, playing on those clichés that make French Girls ™ such a seductive force for the Internet (French Girls ™ don’t cry in front of boys! French Girls ™ always wear matching lingerie! French Girls ™  skip work and spend their days wandering art galleries!). It toed, expertly, the line between “this is all total bullshit” and “...ok, I actually know a couple of girls like this.” Its all-French authors found those small grains of truth that lend credibility and staying power to the myth of French Girls ™ , and added a healthy dose of mystique and cliché for good measure.

Is reductive? Absolutely, but the takeaway is the prise en main of the French Girl ™  experience by those women who are supposed to embody it.

I’m not sure what the future of the French Girl mythology will be, and if it has staying power as an advertising tool in the French market. It certainly does seem inextricably tied to the Made in France brand that’s really taken over the market in the past few years, a sign of a sort of resurgence of national pride on a general level. And that pride itself is tied to geopolitics and soccer games and the zeitgeist.

In some sense, the lure of the French girl seems more powerful than ever. For all of its limitations and reductions, it seems to sit at a sweet spot for advertisers - a positive and potentially inclusive national identity in a globalized world. And although the French may not be as outwardly patriotic as Americans, identifying strongly with being French in general is not a new phenomenon, as limiting as that definition might sometimes be.

What we can hope, I think, is that French women (and advertisers) will continue their takeover of the French Girl ™ narrative. Let them continue to define being French in real-time terms, rather than based on a series of mistranslated clichés. It’s the best hope we’ve got to open up the definition of the word to define cool, badass French women as they are, in all the diversity they represent.

We might argue that the “New Experience Economy” is fueled not so much by generating emotion for consumers, but rather on its promise of digital souvenirs, non-physical objects whose primary use-value is as a brick in the construction and expression of a platform-specific social self. These digital souvenirs are as useful to us as t-shirts once were, perhaps moreso: they allow us to create publicly-accessible tableaux of ourselves over time. 

The uniting factor, however, is the uncanny sense that each of these experiences has been designed to create the perfect social media simulacra: not real experience, not real emotion, but expertly orchestrated to give the impression of it on the Internet. 

If I can get into the “theory” behind this for like thirty seconds, I’ve been really engaged with Russel Belk’s model of “self-extension” these past couple months (we just use what we’re working with over here). Here, though, it’s actually pretty relevant. Essentially, we’d argue that the human psyche distinguishes between “that which is of me” and “that which is not of me” through a sort of orbital structure - like the sun at the center of the solar system, those objects that fall closer in our orbit, as a function of our intimate engagement with them, become increasingly pertinent to the perception and communication of identity as expressed through consumption. This is why the loss of a treasured family heirloom can feel like the loss of a a part of ourselves: in some ways, that’s very much the case. The self “extends” through a network of semiotically communicative objects that form our conception, and expression, of “that which is of me.” 

So then in like the mid-2000’s this dude called Ahuvia expanded on this concept to explain why specific objects get integrated into the closer circles of our identitary orbits: both because they relate to specific aspects of our identities (which may serve a reinforcing mechanism, “I am a guitarist and thus my guitar is a part of myself”), and because these items enable us to concretize these different identities over time through their material presence (“That is my first guitar, that is who I was when I began”). So the important takeaway here is that for Ahuvia, objects aren’t just useful for constructing single, fixed identities: they both recount and reinforce broader, continuous identity narratives over time. 

This is important to the whole “experience economy” deal on two axes: first, because I appreciate that it gives me a socio-scientifically grounded excuse for being so into souvenirs in the first place. The reason Brian is so into t-shirts is because these items allow him to make tangible certain otherwise-invisible aspects of his identity: where he’s been, where he’s going, and to keep these memories as “part of himself” overtime. And with time, as certain objects - certain memories - become more important to him, the closer they approach to the center of that identitary orbit. 

The second reason I’m telling you all this is because it allows us to understand how and why digital objects can replace these traditionally physical manifestations: social media, specifically, has become such an essential - I would even say central - manifestation of the “social self”, in the sense that our identities as expressed in the public sphere are now largely digital productions. I think it’s kind of easy to “shit on” Instagram and “taking pictures for the gram” and whatever, but that would be ignoring the fundamental social power of these platforms. When we talk about the “postmodern self” native to digital platforms, we make reference to the fact that identity, having never been fixed, is now dissimulated and reimboded in different ways through all of these digital spaces: our “Instagram selves” are ourselves, in a certain way. 

And so these digital objects, these social photographs, they find a very intimate spot right in the center ellipses of these identitary narratives; indeed they are the identitary narratives, a primary tool through which we communicate ourselves to the world. There is no opt-out button: presence on these platforms is necessarily communicative, the absence of discourse as powerful as its presence. 

And that’s why I find it so telling that companies have been so handily able to not only offer experiential products that allow consumers to take advantage of the increased curatorial semiotic power which they now possess, but indeed to so expertly adapt these products to the “language of the Internet”. Coming back to the idea of these digital simulacra, the practice of the Instagram self (done typing quotes for this now) has lead to the development of a set of cultures and behaviors native to the platform: the photos that we post there are necessarily adapted to communicate in the most efficient manner possible. 

In that sense, the “experience” being sold by AirBnb or whatever is perfectly constructed to give you the tools you need to add little blocks of “authenticity” or whatever to your lil’ digital idenitary quilt. And I think that’s a good thing: I’m not really in the business of making judgement calls on like social media or whatever because I think we’re social beings and we’re adapting, as best we can, to a new world that gives us this insane amount of communicative power but relatively little history and guidance for understanding it. 

Which is why, then, I actually think it’s all sort of sweet, this idea of capturing fleeting, ephemeral moments of lived experience: isn’t that what purchasing was always sort of about, anyways? And I find that it’s less direct, more symbolic: put down the souvenir t-shirt, capture the sun through the trees or the genuine laugh or whatever and freeze it in time (as you do with photography). Post it and concretize it and let it be a part of a public you, until you decide to delete it from your feed and from yourself. Of course, that’s an idealized view of the whole thing. “Doing it for the ‘gram” is real, communicating in that native IG language is real. And if I need to post a cocktail in front of a pool to tell y’all how cool and trendy my summer experience has been, I’m ready to do that for you.