Taste Culture Vs American Culture

“Rather than unreflexively adopting a lifestyle, through tradition or habit, the new heroes of consumer culture make lifestyle a life project and display their individuality and sense of style in the particularity of the assemblage of goods, clothes, practices, experiences, appearance and bodily dispositions they design together into a lifestyle.” Pg 35.
Growing up as a teenager, brands made a huge impact on I felt about myself and others. I thought that kids who had cooler brands than me had a higher status than I did. I also believed that kids with clothes that weren’t as cool as mine were underneath me and I didn’t want to associate myself with those kids because I felt like they would bring me down. Looking back I see that this is a superficial
I believe that your social and economic class influences your taste and dislikes but there is a grey area in today’s culture. I disagree with the fact that there is a great difference because with social media people have found a way to experience other cultures and ideas without having to leave their homes. I have seen a lot of videos of social media where I would see kids with more money gravitate to trends and crazes of lower classes because they think it’s cool. Social media has the power in educate and open someone’s mind to information that would have never discovered without
As a kid I never understood why the kids who grew up in the worst parts of town had the nicest clothes. I went to a friend’s house who had all of the coolest clothes but yet her home looked so bad that she didn’t even have linen on the mattress. As I got older I realized that a lot of people are more concerned with appearing wealthy that they are willing to sacrifice their personal comfort to splurge on the latest shoe and trends. “And as American society becomes more and more split into two classes, one that is increasingly wealthy and one that is increasingly poor, the social tensions and possibilities for serious class conflict becomes stronger. People can retreat to gated communities to avoid crime, but they end up prisoners of those communities. My point, then, is that advertising often distracts us from paying attention to the need for social investments, from a concern for the public sphere, and thus, by its nature, tends to be politically conservative.” Pg