Making Consumption Conspicuous: Transgressive Topics Go Mainstream

Consider the eighteen-karat gold dinner service commissioned from Tiffany's by Judge Elbert H. Gary, the first chairman of the board of U.S. Steel. Despite some attrition over the years, there were 566 pieces, more than 270 pounds of gold, when the set was auctioned at Sotheby's in 1994. This was service for eighteen: five sizes of plates; dishes for ice cream, almonds, and salt; six kinds of knives, six of forks, and four of spoons; goblets for water and champagne; and a commensurate assortment of serving pieces, including a spoon designed for oscar sauce, something a Google search did not help me identify. According to Gary family lore, the set was used only once, at a dinner for the Sultan of Turkey; maybe somebody noticed that 18K gold scratches easily. The shiny golden photographs in the Sotheby's catalog illuminate our understanding of Thorstein Veblen's phrase "conspicuous consumption" easily as much as Veblen's writing illuminates the meaning of the oscar sauce spoon. ¹

Now consider my new eyeglasses, with frames carrying a famous designer's logo, purchased at an independent eyeglass store near my house. I use them all day, every day. Ponder some less durable products—tubes of lipstick, TV dinners, tennis balls—and some nonmaterial ones—train trips and telephone calls. And think about some consumption venues: Tiffany's, my glasses place, e-Bay and amazon.com, Prada's new SoHo store, where display trumps merchandise, the barber shops in Walker Evans' Depression-era photographs of southern towns.

Finally, consider the historical "field"—if it is a field—variously called the study of "consumer culture," "consumerism," or "consumption," which comprehends all of these. In 1995, one group of historians came to a consensus that, in fact, consumption should not be understood as a "field" in historical studies but rather as "a prism through which many aspects of social and political life may be viewed." Indeed, few (if any) university departments have advertised positions in consumption history; there is no journal, nor any association of consumption historians; several attempts at e-mail lists have fizzled out. Instead, historians of consumption attend meetings specializing in other subfields, including the history of technology as well as environmental history, women's history, and both business and labor history; some scholars deliver talks based on different chapters of their books and dissertations to these different audiences. ²

This essay raises some of the issues developed in the chapters not presented at SHOT meetings. It offers a glimpse of the wealth of historical writing on consumption and consumerism published during the past five years, for the most part describing twentieth-century American developments, although it cannot claim to offer a complete review of this flourishing literature even within those limits. Most of it derives from ways of thinking about consumption that are far removed from the focus on networks and technological diffusion that Ruth Cowan illuminated in her 1987 article on the "consumption junction." But, as Cowan demonstrated there, the history of consumption and consumerism is of fundamental interest to historians of technology because it pertains to the social relations in which technological artifacts are embedded. ³

Field or not, consumption history is no longer a small club. The study of goods, stores, and shopping has become respectable, even fashionable; major journals print articles on topics once considered so trivial as to be transgressive. Operating with neither the benefits nor the strictures of a scholarly tradition, consumption is becoming a player in the master narrative, a topic in the textbook. (In U.S. history texts, it usually shows up first in chapters on the 1920s, despite the substantial evidence of its importance to American society at earlier dates.) We have political histories, intellectual histories, economic and social histories of consumption. We have classroom readers and synthetic overviews. And we have begun to learn about both specific consumer goods and the broader issues of consumption from discussions of...