Perhaps by mistake, a “Bergdorf Goodman Spring Collections 2011 Magazine” arrived at our house. It is half an inch thick with glossy pages. It must cost $5 to print. Probably the cost is distributed among the design houses.
If any woman walked down the street in Lancaster in some of the outfits shown, pedestrians would gawk and assume she had walked off a movie set fantasizing some future century. The fashions bear no relationship to the clothing on sale even at higher price department stores. Flip the magazine over and turn it upside down, and the men’s side becomes apparent. Here too, some of the clothing is downright laughable by usual masculine standards.
But their clientele is of another world: They are of that 1/10th of 1% of the wealthiest Americans, averaging $28 million a year in income and residing in homes high up over fashionable sections of Manhattan, in gated tropical communities, and perhaps also a flat in London or Paris. Except for a few blocks in a few cities or at posh resorts often only accessible by plane, they are invisible to the general public.
This is all representative of how 95% of the population has had their real wages unchanged over the past three decades while the earnings of the top one percent have soared almost geometrically, in large part advantaged through monopolies and government spending, subsidies and tax loop holes.
What is the chance that children of middle class backgrounds might someday be part of that super affluent class? For a large, the patrons of such stores are the progeny of wealthy families. Studies show upper mobility is far less today than in the past.
The models are not portraying some sort of freak show; rather they are testament how the social democracy established in the 1930s through 1970s has been replaced by a plutocracy, government by, for, and on the behalf of the rich, the best government that campaign contributions can buy.
The last eight words of the article say it all: The best government money can buy.