Glamour as a Symptom
DESCRIPTION:
Why do millions spend their evenings with royals, Dubai millionaires and reality TV? A reading with Veblen, Bourdieu, Adorno, Debord and Baudrillard – on kitsch and spectacle as symptoms of class society.
Glamour as a symptom: On kitsch, class and the love of spectacle
It is one of the most persistent obsessions of our time: millions of people who face precarious circumstances daily spend hours in the evening watching the British royal family and following Dubai millionaires at their parties, just as they used to consume romances between foresters’ daughters and counts in penny dreadfuls. The question that is regularly pushed aside in this context is no psychological footnote: what does it mean for society when luxury escapism and trivial kitsch are not marginal phenomena but the mass market?
The simple answer – that people are naive, easily distracted, or simply too exhausted for anything better – systematically falls short. It is morally and analytically unproductive. Anyone who understands how kitsch and the staging of luxury actually work understands something fundamental about the psychological economy of capitalist class societies – across the ages, from Wilhelmine court reporting to ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and ‘Dubai Bling’ on Netflix.
Looking up and the school of envy.
Thorstein Veblen laid bare the basic principle as early as 1899: the ruling class demonstrates its status not through work, but through ostentatious idleness and wasteful consumption – ‘conspicuous consumption’. Crucial to this is a shift that Veblen captures with the term “vicarious consumption”: the working population consumes vicariously. It admires wealth, identifies with prosperity and mimics its symbolic gestures – formerly through pulp fiction, today through cinemas, television programmes and reality TV formats.
In this sense, the British Royal Family is one of the oldest, best-funded spectacles of ‘conspicuous consumption’ in the world. It stages lavish displays – palaces, coronations, jewellery, protocol – as a quasi-natural expression of a higher order. The billions swallowed up by this apparatus are not a side effect but the very core: only boundless luxury serves as a genuine symbol of sovereignty. What applies to the royal family applies, structurally, in the same way to the bling world of Dubai, to ‘Aristotrash’ formats, and to the ‘jewellery empires’ of streaming platforms: the staging of excess is the content, not the packaging.
The envy these spectacles generate is the fuel. Envy captures attention, creates emotional intensity and keeps the audience in a permanent emotional relationship with the wealth on display. At the same time, this envy is regulated by admiration and moral distancing: one enjoys, one despises, one judges – and returns the very next evening.
The sickly sweet taste of powerlessness
Pierre Bourdieu has analysed and clarified this dynamic. Aesthetic preferences – including whether one enjoys or despises kitsch, or whether one watches *Klunkerimperium* or Arte documentaries – are not free individual choices. They are class-specific, internalised dispositions, a *habitus* that reproduces a subject’s social position within the class structure.
Kitsch occupies a special position within this system. It allows the lower and middle classes a dual movement of distinction: vis-à-vis the lower classes, the consumption of kitsch legitimises itself as aesthetic refinement (one has ‘taste’, after all, even if this taste is regarded as vulgar by those above); towards the upper class, it opens a back door to symbolic participation – one knows the right symbols, recognises the gestures, follows the dramaturgy. The kitsch consumer is neither inside nor outside; they inhabit the social space of the permanent attempt at symbolic ascent.
Hedwig Courths-Mahler industrialised this mechanism in literature during the Weimar Republic. Her more than 200 romance novels recount the same structure with monotonous reliability: a virtuous young woman of humble origins, love across class boundaries, the resolution of the conflict through romantic union and social elevation. This is a distraction and a systematic emotional training in the fantasy of conflict-free integration into the ruling structures. Class differences are eroticised and individualised; overcoming them through love replaces overcoming them through collective action. The reader may not understand why the world is as it is, but for one evening, they are allowed to pretend that one can escape it through saccharine virtue and chance.
What kitsch conceals
Theodor W. Adorno defined kitsch more sharply than as mere entertainment: for him, it is the dregs of the culture industry, a residue of de-auratised art. Kitsch uses sentimentality to simulate emotional depth and collective significance without demanding the cognitive strain of genuine aesthetic experience. It is, in Adorno’s words, an ‘alienation of alienation’ – it strips art of its critical power and transforms it into frictionless, substitute emotional gratification.
This explains why kitsch is so structurally stable. It satisfies the same need as high culture – for emotion, for meaning, for the feeling that one’s own emotional experience is real and valid – but it does so without the resistance that genuine art offers. Anyone who reads Courths-Mahler or watches (or reads) ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ is not unsettled, not compelled to reflect, not confronted with their own limitations. They are affirmed, warmed, and reassured.
This “warm bath” – the “kitsch effect” – is an active psychological achievement in a society that demands considerable loss of control, social insecurity, and symbolic devaluation from its members daily. It offers a conflict-free fantasy world and rational self-medication under unquestionable conditions.
The spectacle thrives on its viewer.
Guy Debord’s analysis of the “Society of the Spectacle” (1967) radicalises this diagnosis: on the one hand, the spectacle is a collection of images superimposed upon the real world. But above all, it is the social relationship itself, mediated through images. What is consumed in the form of royal family coverage, bling reality TV, or aristotrash formats are class relations in their media form. The relationship between observer and spectacle is already a relationship between the dispossessed and the possessor.
Jean Baudrillard hones this into a decisive point: the spectacle no longer represents an original that it conceals. The British monarchy stages ‘rule’ and ‘tradition’ without possessing any real political sovereignty. It is a simulacrum: a sign that no longer refers to any reality, but only to other signs. What circulates are silly hats, historical costumes, crowns, titles, ceremonies, dynasties – not power, but its image. And this image is, in Baudrillard’s terms, more hyperreal than any real monarchy: more convincing, more complete, more satisfying.
What is significant here is that consumers are being deceived, and their complicity is knowing. ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ generated a worldwide box-office success of around $238 million on a budget of $30 million – and the audience knew upon entering the cinema that they were not buying a sociologically realistic portrayal of the Singaporean elite. They were buying into the pleasure of the simulation. The British royal family audience, who are aware of the political irrelevance of the House of Windsor, yet still shed tears when a coronation is broadcast, behave similarly. They are not being naive – they are enjoying playing along with the game.
The crisis paradigm: why kitsch booms in certain eras
No sociological argument can fully explain cross-epochal appeal without taking historical contingency into account. The emergence of mass kitsch and luxury spectacles is not coincidentally concentrated in certain periods: the Wilhelmine era, the Weimar Republic, the Gilded Age, and the post-2008 present.
These periods are linked by a common structure: widespread impoverishment caused by rapid industrialisation (or deindustrialisation), growing material inequality, a loss of trust in political institutions, and the breakdown of traditional social cohesion. In the Weimar Republic, Courths-Mahler novels, revue culture and early entertainment films flourished alongside mass inflation, unemployment and political radicalisation. Today, ‘Dubai bling’, royal fandom and TikTok luxury displays are booming alongside a housing crisis, stagnating real wages and growing institutional mistrust.
This mechanism is no coincidence: conditions of social crisis increase the psychological demand for symbolic compensation and emotional stabilisation. Kitsch and luxury spectacles are, in this sense, counter-cyclical consumer goods – demand for them rises when reality feels increasingly unbearable. What this means for the providers – media companies, platforms, monarchical institutions – is obvious: crisis is a business model.
Multicultural kitsch and the neutralisation of criticism
A contemporary variant deserves separate consideration: the integration of representational politics into luxury spectacles. ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ was hailed as a breakthrough for the visibility of Asian-American actors in Hollywood, as the first studio ensemble with an almost exclusively Asian cast in 25 years. This is factually correct and not without political significance. But it deserves a critical look.
What the film delivers is what academic critics term a “multicultural redemption narrative”: a narrative in which inclusion within existing hierarchies is equated with liberation. Singapore’s class structure remains invisible; the migrant labour behind the glamour does not exist. “Diversity” becomes a spectacle, whilst class relations remain untouched. Representation as a commodity: one buys the feeling of progress without any shift in ownership.
The same logic applies to the royal family: when Harry marries Meghan, it is seen as an act of modernisation. When Charles speaks about mental health, the institution becomes “more relevant”. The façade is given a fresh coat of paint, but the foundations remain untouched. Representation without redistribution is kitsch in political form.
What this says about us
It would be wrong to distil a moral judgement about the audience from this analysis. Understanding the sociological function of kitsch and luxury spectacle does not mean despising their consumers. The demand for escapism, fantasies of social advancement and symbolic warmth is a rational response to real psychological demands.
What the analysis reveals is the asymmetry: whilst the spectacle’s function of providing psychological relief is real, its political function is structurally conservative. Spectacles bind up affective energy that might otherwise flow into political articulation. This does not mean that the consumption of kitsch stabilises domination; rather, the spectacle’s overall form has a social function that extends beyond individual consumption.
The British monarchy does not exist as a mass phenomenon, despite its political insignificance – it exists because of it. As a pure system of signs that delivers hierarchy, tradition and symbolic warmth without political substance, it is the perfect machine for mass affective attachment without collective consequence. It costs billions. It produces no content other than itself. And as long as the conditions that generate demand for it persist, it will continue to be consumed.
The question is not why people love it. The question is what kind of society makes it necessary.
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