Funko Pops, Marvel, Miu Miu, and A24. It’s All the Same Thing
Me and my friends in our third place, eating figs and cottage cheese, not a phone in sight
The Labubu Matcha Dubai Chocolate meme was a personal attack targeted towards me. Not because I own a Labubu or because I’m dumb enough to think kunafa with green tahini smeared on it tastes good. It was a personal attack because of who it was coming from. The Tabi wearing, Tarkovsky watching, Susan Sonntag reading ghouls of the world got together and decided to hold other, less annoying people, in contempt the same way I did to them all these years. Every time I scrolled my very normal and apolitical Twitter For You page and saw a Labubu Dubai Chocolate joke, it could almost always be attributed to someone who would post pictures of sourdough bread and models on a runway. I contemplated writing about the hypocrisy of these rosemary sourdough bakers. How could they not see the obvious irony in branding others as brainless consumerists for liking a little toy while they celebrated LVMH’s latest slopfest? I briefly decided against writing anything about this, there’s nothing more arthoe-ish than writing a cultural analysis essay but I realised, I have a blog now, not a substack or Youtube Essay channel, but a blog. I can totally write about conspicuous consumption because I’m not going to ask you to subscribe to anything. I won’t even ask you to use my NordVPN promo code for 20% off. Not yet.
The cycle of any mass marketable product goes like this: it begins as a little artisanal good, it picks up steam among clout-chasing aesthetes usually because of its proximity to a more coveted but expensive designer product, it explodes in popularity, it is shunned by the real tastemakers and then slowly but surely by the public, the tastemakers then try to rehabilitate it later on when another little artisanal good starts picking up steam. Stanley cups were soulless yes, but in comparison to Labubus at least they had um… character. And individuality. These little cheap Chinese dolls have no individuality or character and are only for the similarly bland and boring masses (don’t ask the tastemakers why Chinese products exclusively seem to upset them).
The point at which you enter the cycle and what role you play doesn’t matter very much. Clout chasing aesthetes is just a silly way of saying kids with rich parents and often they have more money in the bank than the tastemakers. But tastemakers don’t need money, they get everything for free in PR packages and they can go months without paying rent, everyone trusts them, including their landlords when they get told “I’ll pay you in a couple weeks time.” The masses are often following both the clout-chasing aesthetes and tastemakers through social media and will never admit that they are just masses. Ordinary people will consider themselves both trend setters or seasoned critics depending on who’s video essay they last fell asleep to watched and how much disposable income they currently have.
Conspicuous consumption is a phrase often used by tastemakers and their loyal followers against Labubus, logos, rich kids with dropshopping businesses and the masses. It’s a phrase used to let you know that they decide what’s good. They went to taste school and they have a degree in taste, that’s why they know what conspicuous consumption means and why you don’t. You went to normal school and studied “English” or “Engineering” pfft, I bet you they didn’t even teach you about the puff sleeve as a deconstructive gesture against sartorial hegemony. But the problem with taste school is that they had to twist the meaning of the phrase conspicuous consumption because if they explained it the way Thorstein Veblen did, well then there would be no such thing as taste school.
Veblen was an American economist who lived a long time ago. His name is weird because he was actually Scandinavian which begins to make sense if you look at his face. He wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899 and no one liked it, it hit a little too close to home for academia circles back then. But in 2025 everyone likes his little book, because academia circles have managed to twist it into something that means nothing. Tastemakers will tell you tall tales of something called ‘New Money,’ a class of people who have more money than them, but less taste because they’re not used to having money. According to the art hoes of the world, only New Money and the vulgar masses who buy from SheIn are preoccupied with their social status, which is why only they and their garish ways count as conspicuous consumption. The only way to consume conspicuously is by buying branded clothes, the latest trendy knick knacks and listening to Morgan Wallen. Conspicuous means loud and obvious. Polyester tops and only polyester tops are loud and obvious. But what does Mr. Veblen really have to say?
“The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty. Our higher appreciation of the superior article is an appreciation of its superior honorific character, much more frequently than it is an unsophisticated appreciation of its beauty. The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is not commonly present, consciously, in our canons of taste, but it is none the less present as a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful, and guiding our discrimination with respect to what may legitimately be approved as beautiful and what may not.”
Veblen says it very, extremely simply, you’d be stupid not to understand that word vomit but you’re into K-pop so I’ll explain it to you. Taste isn’t an innate gift given to some and not others. Our collective tastes are shaped by what is most wasteful and wasteful here doesn’t mean unsustainable, this is a book from the 19th century Veblen doesn’t know what a paper straw is but being a Scandinavian with autism he probably does know Greta Thunberg’s great great grandpa. Conspicuous wastefulness in this context means any expenditure of time, effort, or resources that do not contribute to humanity in a material, functional sense. Knowing about Labubus and wanting a Labubu is indeed wasteful. In the two seconds you scrolled Tiktok and watched an unboxing you could have fixed a pothole. But isn’t knowing about and treasuring Sandy Liang, the Row or Yohji Yamamoto even more wasteful? What makes a cardigan from Miu Miu so expensive? It’s not the craftsmanship, that’s what the Twitter menswear guy wants you to think, but there’s really nothing magical about the material, the stitching or the buttons on that cardigan that justify the markup. It’s not the designer ethos or the message either. You don’t get to say “oh this cardigan is all about the dialectic of coquettish minimalism,” and stick on a 5000 dollar price tag because of it. Designer clothes are expensive because in every step of their production they are wasteful, and you, by being able to afford wasting your money and time on a wasteful product, are able to conspicuously signal your role as a person who exists above the crude necessity of function.
Tastemakers often emphasise their love for “slow fashion,” thrifting and local art, it’s easy to say that this is just a reaction to the supposed overconsumption of today but as Veblen says in his own medieval Norwegian peasant kind of way: conspicuous wastefulness selectively shapes and sustains our sense of what is beautiful. Thrifting could be the cheaper option (though nowadays it rarely is) it still requires you to waste time. Picking out clothes at a charity shop requires much more effort than picking out clothes in Zara where they have already been curated for you. To thrift efficiently, you need to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of brands, you need to understand when a dead lady’s clothes are vintage and when they are old-fashioned. Veblen explains that even in matters of knowledge and education one can ‘conspiciously consume’ by filling their brains with wasteful knowledge.
“In our time there is the knowledge of the dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music and other household art; of the latest properties of dress, furniture, and equipage; of games, sports, and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and race-horses. In all these branches of knowledge the initial motive from which their acquisition proceeded at the outset, and through which they first came into vogue, may have been something quite different from the wish to show that one’s time had not been spent in industrial employment; but unless these accomplishments had approved themselves as serviceable evidence of an unproductive expenditure of time, they would not have survived and held their place as conventional accomplishments of the leisure class.”
The difference between a Marvel movie and A24’s latest production, what makes one ‘slop’ and what makes the other high art, is that those who know what A24 is have more time and money to waste. Those with a Letterboxd account where they write out their snarky reviews of a black and white French-Japanese surrealist art film, don’t need to know how to weld a joint. Those who care about dead languages and the latest properties of dress may very well come from difficult backgrounds but that’s only what makes them the strongest strivers and greatest enforcers of the commands of the tastemakers, this is after all the entire point of conspicuous consumption, to show that your bank account balance doesn’t matter because you are wealthy and sophisticated in your taste. The fashion student whose parents were against their choice of career understands what their common, unsophisticated parents don’t, you can get out of paying rent if you get rich people to trust you enough remember? And being a leech-y gate keeper is easier and more lucrative than toiling all day in the mud and opening doors for yourself and others like you.
It’s OK, I don’t know how to weld either. My day is full of such wasteful activities and my brain is full of such useless thoughts. In many ways, I, too, am participating in this game by trying to ascend above both the vulgar masses and the refined, wasteful elite (I am succeeding by the way) but as much as I want to entirely escape what Veblen calls “the surveillance of the law of conspicuous waste,” I can’t and neither can you. You can only try to possess some self-awareness to navigate it all. The worst crime of the oat-milk intelligentsia is how they wish for the return of ‘snobbiness,’ while having no true convictions and falling for what’s more cleverly marketed than a collectible toy. It’s the arrogance to say that others lack ‘media literacy’ while echoing a phrase they hear on Op-Eds without ever really investigating it. If you want to consume inconspicuously, make sure your heart is not proud and your eyes are not haughty; do not concern yourself with great matters or things too wonderful for you.
