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.
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Famous quotes containing the words material and/or possessions:
“Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“We are told it will be of no use for us to ask this measure of justice—that the ballot be given to the women of our new possessions upon the same terms as to the men—because we shall not get it. It is not our business whether we are going to get it; our business is to make the demand.... Ask for the whole loaf and take what you can get.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)