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:
“We soon saw, as he saw, that he was not to be pardoned or rescued by men. That would have been to disarm him, to restore to him a material weapon, a Sharp’s rifle, when he had taken up the sword of the spirit,—the sword with which he has really won his greatest and most memorable victories. Now he has not laid aside the sword of the spirit, for he is pure spirit himself, and his sword is pure spirit also.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... dependence upon material possessions inevitably results in the destruction of human character.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)