There is no more obvious recession indicator than our obsession with spotting recession indicators. The economy has become so bad, financial times so grim and bleak that any sign of a looming recession has become a joke within itself.
Online, people point to everything from Lady Gaga appearing in Netflix shows to John Krasinski being named People Magazine’s sexiest man as indicators of an impending economic crash. The joke can be applied to anything, really: the return of twee, the fact men are taking selfies, iridescent make-up, not knowing anyone with a sugar daddy any more. They’re all recession indicators.
On TikTok, even the tendency to “romanticise your life” by celebrating small acts of self-care has become laughably unambitious. A recent viral post which saw Gen Z lusting after “buying themselves groceries for the small apartment they live in” was quickly branded more of a recession indicator than stockpiling cans or investing in gold bars.
It’s strange, though, that despite our collective obsession with linking culture and economic depression, nobody has yet pointed out the true recession indicator of our bleak times: a cultural return to 1980s excess, and the renewed fetishisation of “posh aesthetics”.
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From American Psycho’s approaching reboot to the return of power dressing (yes, teenagers are wearing business casual to the clubs again, they didn’t listen to millennials, they love oversized blazers as much as we loved pencil skirts), our cultural outlook is firmly placed over our shoulders, at a yuppified and Thatcherite past.
Take a look at online reselling platforms or fashion moodboards and find them saturated with photos of Princess Diana in Rowing Blazers and Chanel, and how-to guides on micro-trends that all model themselves after either the pursuit or the aestheticism of wealth. After the logomania of the early 2020s, “quiet luxury” was the biggest trend in 2023′s breakneck style cycle. It is, as it sounds, all about looking like you have so much money that you don’t need to flaunt it, you simply can’t help but do so.
Or look to your TV, where Disney+’s biggest recent hit, Rivals, presents itself as a panacea to real life economic depression by transporting us back to the heyday of 1980s hyper-consumerism. Based on Jilly Cooper’s book of the same name, Rivals is pure horny escapism. Alex Hassell takes his clothes off, and smoulders, while espousing the virtues of Thatcher’s Tory government. Aidan Turner takes his clothes off, and smoulders, while wrestling with the tightrope that is remaining true to his socialist principles while living in a mansion in the Cotswolds.
Working-class representation in TV, film, music and the arts generally has plummeted. Upper-middle class, privately educated writers, artists, directors, actors and singers are hugely overrepresented in their industries. Of course these people deliver us stories about the pursuit of capital
Everyone cheats and drinks champagne and gets paid far too much money, and even when bad things happen they’re tinged with a kind of twisted glamour. Everything is overabundant, everything is oversaturated, everyone is overpaid and the consumption of everything – sex, food, ambition – is up for grabs. What could possibly be a better escape from the drudgery of 2025, where nobody can own a house and nobody is having sex any more, if you believe the Gen Z hype, and nobody can work in the arts unless they went to the same kind of overpriced and exclusive private schools patronised by the evil-but-sexy characters of Rivals.
Unsurprisingly, Rivals has been an instant success – a second season is rumoured to already be on the cards. But as a skewering and celebration of the relentless pursuit of capital, its popularity is not unrivalled (sorry). HBO’s back-to-back success stories of Succession and Industry are both immersions in the world of the rich, powerful and hungry, the former telling the story of a billionaire media family, the latter taking place on the trading floors of London’s banking world and the upper echelons of society attached to it. In the most recent series, a smug tech CEO, played by Kit Harrington, urges one of the only characters from working class stock – his banker, Rob – to call him a ‘posh c**t’ for the thrill it will presumably give him.
The same themes play out in Saltburn, the film sensation that brought in the last new year. Throwing it back to the previous pre-recession era of the late 00s, Saltburn looks and sounds unnervingly contemporary for a so-called period piece. The clothes are the same, the music is still around, the world still has a glut of Felixes.
For all its criticism, the Emerald Fennell project was at least sartorially accurate. When I was at school – around the era in which Saltburn was set – the fashion was as preppy as it is today, although we did not yet have the vocabulary to define it as “quiet luxury”. Teenagers expressed coolness through Canterbury bottoms or Ralph Lauren shirts and listened to Vampire Weekend and The Strokes. And then after the 2008 crash, at university, these teenagers suddenly disappeared in a puff of Hollister perfume.
In their place were the same bodies, now clad in the kind of clothes meant to hide their wealth, not flaunt it. Latently imbued with private school guilt, these kids now wanted to look skint. Fetishisation of wealth was firmly out. The 80s excess we’re seeing celebrated now in fashion and on screen would have been considered somewhere between social suicide and deeply passé (which perhaps are the same thing when you’re 19). What happened in between that made it okay and not deeply uncool to return to tweed and signet rings? In short: years of the kind of economic conditions that make recession indicators pointless when it already feels like we’re in one.
In Ireland and Britain a combination of a housing crisis, constant political instability, the impact of Brexit and the overhang of the pandemic means the economy feels to most young(ish) adults like something that has always been bad. Inflation continues to outstrip wages and the cost-of-living crisis is exacerbated by international conflict. We feel skint because we are skint. And sadly, when financial instability is the norm, the fetishisation of wealth is inevitable.
If it was just that – a fetish – then perhaps we wouldn’t need to care about it. Nobody wants to kinkshame. But, not to sound like one of the aforementioned kinkshamers, it’s increasingly obvious that fetishes don’t exist inside a vacuum. They have real-world consequences. It’s no wonder, in particular, that the arts world has begun to openly fetishise the pursuit of wealth – in one generation, working-class representation in TV, film, music and the arts generally has plummeted. Upper-middle class, privately educated writers, artists, directors, actors and singers are hugely over-represented in their industries. Of course these people deliver us stories about the pursuit of capital. What else do they have to talk about? What else do we have to watch, listen to, read?
And in the case of our creeping love of posh, the real-world consequences to cultural wealthaphilia are a rise in social conservatism even stronger than its fiscal counterpart. In dating culture, online diktat has encouraged a new kind of adversarial attitude to love. Dating coaches with millions of followers and impressions encourage young women to see their boyfriends not as partners but as philanthropists.
SheraSeven, one of the biggest proponents of this ideology, released a book last year entitled Sprinkle Sprinkle: How To Date a Provider and Avoid a Dusty. A viral song, released last summer, Man In Finance, follows the same path, with its lyrics telling the story of a woman who ditched a date with a musician to seek out a man with a trust fund instead.
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At its most extreme end this kind of thinking leads to the glorification of trad wives, women who see their place as in the home, being provided for by their husband and in turn providing him with housework and children. And although some argue that these new financial rules of dating are merely women pushing back against gender inequality that already exists, it’s reductive and feels like a step backwards, not forwards, for anything remotely akin to feminism. More simply, it’s depressing.
In that regard at least, trad wives and financially motivated dating tactics are just a sign of more widely depressing times. A recession indicator, perhaps. Part of a wider trend in fashion and film and TV that will see more shows about the fabulously wealthy as we continue to teeter on the brink of our own economic precipice. Or perhaps our sudden lust for richer, posh aesthetics can’t really be a recession indicator at all. Is it possible to have recession indicators when you’re already in a recession that just never, ever ends? If that question is too heavy to consider, then perhaps some escapist television will help. I recommend Jilly Cooper’s Rivals. Fantastic show.
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