As I gazed upon another loving photo of a £1,000 cashmere sweater (this one by an Italian luxury brand nicknamed “Uniqlo for billionaires” and worn by Gwyneth Paltrow during her recent skiing trial), I started to feel a little ill. Not sick, exactly. More – the shivering doom of a very bad hangover, that sudden prickly awareness of your skin or the vulnerability of an eyeball. Why do we normal people, we mortals, with debts and mortgages and hungers and stains, still want to dress like the super-wealthy? And why do we insist on adopting or lusting after their absolute blandest fashions?
“Stealth wealth” is the name given to the clothes worn by the extremely rich – very fine wools in navy or grey, oversized coats, tiny handbags, whites so bright they’re almost blue, a thousand shades of camel, a whole caravan of them, a palette that whispers “taste” with a little lisp. Logos are replaced with secret codes – a clever little stitch at the hem, or a hoodie made of cashmere.
Woven through these merino wools and pale suedes are the codes and strappings of a life where the wrong type of collar, for example, betrays you as a gatecrasher, a fraud. For years now, the fashion press has monitored and marketed these clothes to the rest of us, frauds every last one, with the unspoken promise that if we spend the equivalent of the price of a car on our new jumper, we too might gain access to a world that doesn’t want us.
The most chilling expressions of stealth wealth for me tend to go hand in hand with simple facts about the fortunes that purchased them, like the £570 suede slippers worn on the school run by Akshata Murty (one of the wealthiest women in Britain and Rishi Sunak’s wife). Shortly before being seen in them, she’d received her yearly dividend of £11.5m from an Indian company still operating in Russia. The stealthiness of the fashion, its blank quality, works as a sort of invisibility cape, armour or magic spell, allowing the very rich to march cleanly through walls of tax, war or morals, or slide unnoticed under doors into the rooms where decisions are made.
While Gwyneth Paltrow’s gloriously diverting ski trial (my favourite ski trial to date) went a long way towards helping me forgive her for past crimes (such as pandemic profiteering by hawking a list of long-Covid products including a “hiking necklace” costing almost $9,000, or declaring that water has feelings), the success of her old money fashion somehow chilled me. Looking back at the most entertaining court cases of recent years, it became clear Paltrow was the anti-Vardy, swishing through court in neutral knitwear and chunky boots, rather than huge handbags, tailoring and tight dresses.
I was reminded of Smart Works, the charity supported by Meghan Markle, which provides interview outfits to women referred from women’s refuges, homeless shelters and the Prison Service, clothes styled, in part, to disguise their wearers’ lack of power. While the charity does important work, its existence is a stark acknowledgment that we will always be judged by a set of classist rules seemingly carved, by diamond, in stone. The very rich benefit, hourly.
Perhaps I would mind this “quiet luxury” less if the clothes were fabulous. But, instead, they’re bloodless, grandly bland, dreary. They speak of money, not taste; of fear, not joy. Why should the rest of us buy them – what good are the clothes without the power? If we’ve learned anything from our good friends in Succession, it is the true horrors of being wealthy, the boredom, the panic, the interminable snacks. Why would we want to cosplay as a billionaire when we know that to be so is to live without trust, without shame, to be monstrous? What sick trick are we playing on ourselves? It makes me wonder about our relationship to politicians, too – rather than making him unelectable, why does the cash and privilege of a billionaire like Sunak (who once visited a construction site wearing a pair of £490 Prada suede loafers) instead seem to inspire so many people to doff their caps and run to Selfridges? These people are ruining our lives, and our response is to buy their shoes?
If I were 5in more cynical, I’d suggest the reason we’re encouraged to invest our bitter pennies in rich people’s fashions has very little to do with the clothes themselves. While we’re spending all our money on a pair of slippers, we’re distracted from the real work of fighting for economic equality (over the past two years, the richest 1% grabbed nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together), toppling rotten power structures and overthrowing the billionaire class – we’ve been cheated into feeling as if we’re in their club because we’re wearing the same brand hoodie.
Buying into “stealth wealth” feels like buying a band T-shirt, except the band are the worst people in the world, and the T-shirt costs the same as a month’s rent, and the music is them laughing as they shout “Eat shit” from a car. With the greatest respect, no thank you.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
