Material Possessions
Possessions typically perceived as status symbols may include a large house or penthouse apartment, a trophy wife, haute couture fashionable clothes, or a luxury vehicle. A sizeable collection of high-priced artworks or antiques may be displayed, sometimes in multiple seasonally-occupied residences located around the world. Privately-owned aircraft and luxury yachts are movable status symbols that can be taken from one glamorous location to another.
Status symbols are also used by persons of much more modest means. In the Soviet Union before the fall of the Berlin Wall, possession of American-style blue jeans or rock music recordings (even pirated or bootlegged copies) was an important status symbol among rebellious teenagers. In the 1990s, foreign cigarettes in China, where a pack of Marlboro could cost one day's salary for some workers, were seen as a status symbol. Cellphone usage in Turkey had been considered a status symbol in early 1990s, but is less distinctive today, because of the spread of inexpensive cellphones. In Cuba, currently the possession of a cellphone, laptop, flat-screen TV, game console, or any car regardless of its age; as well as having foreign friends, traveling abroad, having a job in a foreign company, having access to internet, or working in the tourism industry, are all status symbols.
Read more about this topic: Status Symbol
Famous quotes containing the words material and/or possessions:
“What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons—reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.”
—Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)
“People who get through life dependent on other people’s possessions are always the first to lecture you on how little possessions count.”
—Ben Elton (b. 1959)