Is Big Coming Back? Will we see the return of conspicuous consumption?

I have seen the future. It looks like Saratoga, or Sunday morning, or Vegas in the 1950s. It looks big and extravagant.

Lots of us are feeling shell shocked by the outcome on the presidential election.

I think it’s wrong to let our trepidation interfere with our ability to speculate on what the future might hold. It’s time to “shake it off,” as Coach would say.

There is a chance that the Trump presidency will provoke economic growth, new jobs, and a new sense of optimism. And I believe this may provoke a new style of consumer behavior. (I do not say this to praise the president-elect. I’m dispassionate.)

I think it’s possible we will see exuberance that we haven’t seen for many years, a conspicuous consumption that fell out of fashion 60 years ago.

Sixty years ago we were living very large indeed. Cars especially were a little like rocket ships, fins and all. Ironically the only place these live on is the streets of Cuba. Cars are little, squished and squishing. Cars are living little, not large.

In the 1950s, conspicuous consumption was driven was caught up in a number of cultural movements. Notions of progress, upward mobility, social hierarchy, status competition all were in play. (See the passage below for more details.)

At this point it’s hard to say which ideas will be the particular engines of the new conspicuous consumption.The best we can do is to suggest that the first condition of consumer enthusiasm, the Mazolovian condition of wealth, security and optimism, may be about to fall into place.

So this take this post as the earliest warning, highly speculative, and a piece of guess work. “Why bother, when this work is so speculative,?” you may ask. As with all future forecasting, we don’t actually want to wait until the moment is upon us to begin responding to it. These days that’s much too late. (Note to Democratic organizers: consider this post a first glimpse of what you may be up against in 4 years.)

To be sure, living large in the Trump era will have to fight its way up stream. There are many counter trends in place.

I was in Hudson New York a couple of weeks ago, and found everyone in autumnal browns and golds and greens.

I was wearing my dopey Land’s End Squall jacket, bright yellow and completely wrong.

(I do think it is sometimes useful to look a bit clueless when doing ethnographies. The respondent only needs to take one look at you to say, “Oh, well, clear this guy has NO idea. I’m going to have to give him the whole story.”)

Big has been eclipsed by a succession of subcultures. It was scorned by hippies, skaters, Gen X, Millennials, hipsters, Brooklyn, startup culture, DIY culture, artisanal culture, academics, old wealth, big cities, small towns and both coasts. Big has been almost completely friendless. It staged a small, but undernourished, comeback in the 1970s. Also it found a friend in Bling. But otherwise, big has been small, a mere blip on the cultural radar.

Which brings me to Saratoga, New York. Pam and I went there a couple of years ago to visit friends, Craig and Cheryl. And inevitably, we went to the race track. And I mean it was like ‘wow.’ Truly totally wow. We were time traveling. Big hats. On men and women. Big gestures. Flashing clothing. Big bets (to judge from the behavior of the crowd.) Even the cologne was big. There was a “Let It Rip” enthusiasm that Canadians and the British (my cultures of origin) look on with a mixture of astonishment, admiration, gratitude and of course horror. The Canadian, British “thing” is captured in a phrase: “Don’t make a spectacle of yourself.” To judge from appearances (and no ethnographic research), this is precisely what Saratoga is for. Going big or going home. Saratoga is like Faulkner’s south: not only is the past not dead, it’s not past.

This is good news for the luxury brands which have been gasping and on the robes for quite a long time now. It’s good news for advertisers who for years and years and years sold things by claiming they would aid people in their upward aspirations and mobility. We can’t know exactly how this will play out but its time for marketers, designers and other cultural creatives to get out their history texts and have a look at the 1950s and the last eruption of big. Or go to Saratoga, church or Vegas.

Every good prediction is implausible. It runs against the status quo, the prevailing ethos, what Bourdieu called Doxa, the things we take for granted, the things we take to be self evident. So the one thing we can’t use to judge this prediction is our “gut.” That is sometimes right in a Gladwellian “blink” kind of way. But often it is precisely wrong. Really good predictions show us what we cannot see. (At the height of midcentury modernism no one, and I mean no one, thought that “retro” would ever stage a comeback. It was corny, old fashioned and totally done. That was then.)

The trick is to keep an eye out for early outbreaks of big. It will come first as consumers hunt out things on the market that are big. Then the fast response commerce will begin to scale things. Designers will eventually begin to scale things up and over the existing constraints. (And boy will they do this kicking and screaming, forcing the obsolescence of more than a few careers.)

The hat pictured here is the DONNA VINCI HAT 5512. It is $259.99. Buy it here.

post script:

I had a go at the conspicuous consumption of the 1950s a couple of years. Here is a brief excerpt from the book in question.

The characteristics of the Forward look [in automobile design] were clear and surprisingly consistent across competitive models [from Detroit] (Brean 1954, p. 82). The Forward look was not very stream lined, forsaking the “least possible resistance” for the greatest possible show. The Forward look was substantial, imposing, dramatic, and heavy with chrome. Consumers might be embracing modernist simplicity in their home, office, clothing and appliance design. But when it came to cars, they wanted something else. What they wanted, Horn tells us, were “cruel-looking tail fins, grinning front grilles, tensed wrap-around windshields, and splendid bodies lashed with chrome highlights” (Horn 1985, p. 12).

The Forward look came, mostly, from General Motors, largely in the design of Buick, Oldsmobile and Cadillac, chiefly through the design work of Ned F. Nickles and Harley Earl who had been planning it since 1950 (Brean 1954; Sparke 1998). The oral tradition in Detroit has conflicting versions of the origins of the Forward look, but a credible account comes from Alfred Sloan who said that Earl drew part of his inspiration from the planes he saw while visiting an Air Force friend during World War II (1963, p. 323; Hillier 1983, p. 146). Earl’s 1954 models were a culmination of his work on the 1948 Cadillac, the 1949 Oldsmobile, and the 1951 Le Sabre (Basham, Ughetti and Rambali 1984). All three players, Cadillac, Buick and Oldsmobile, had released variations on the theme from the beginning of the decade. It was in 1954 that the Forward look made a systematic bid for consumer attention.

from McCracken, Grant. 2005. “When Cars Could Fly: Raymond Loewy, John Kenneth Galbraith, and the 1954 Buick.” In Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning, and Brand Management, 53–90. Indiana University Press.