Curated home
A collection about conspicuous consumption. Home pride status showing off and keeping up with the Joneses.
Andrew Reeves and
Curated home
You might divide everything in life into two categories: utility and beauty. These aren’t mutually exclusive, of course—nearly anything could be both: a shirt, a building, a relationship—the difference comes down to intention.
Cultivating a Vibe
how design has become mass user-centered, driven by rules of optimization, efficiency and engineering.
Thomas Klaffke • Visualizing Minimalist Design
warm minimalism
Functionality still matters, of course. But competition has pushed quality so high and prices so low that many manufacturers can no longer distinguish themselves with price and performance, as traditionally defined. In a crowded marketplace, aesthetics is often the only way to make a product stand out.
-Virginia Postrel
Membership is also a vehicle of the modern aspiration economy. It represents a shift from doing things for the benefit of others (conspicuous consumption) to a value model where we invest in things that benefit ourselves: access, knowledge, information, experience, privacy, belonging, self-actualization. In the modern aspiration economy, consumers ... See more
Ana Andjelic • From Loyalty to Membership
The bottle service club today pitches Goffman’s “action” to the world’s new elite; it encourages the rich to flaunt their riches, to display wealth for display’s sake. Bottle service clubs are predicated on conspicuous consumption, a term coined, in 1899, by Thorstein Veblen, the quirky Norwegian American economist.