The Sign Language of Luxury: How Wealth Indicators Are Evolving in 2025
By Lauren CochraneIn some ways, showing how rich you are with what you wear is the same as it ever was. See ridiculously priced items that goad the plebs made by The Row, or a Birkin owned by the actual Jane Birkin selling for an eye watering $8.6m at auction.
But each turn of the news cycle brings another story of the economy tanking. If the rest of us are noticing this every time we go to the supermarket or check our bank balance, then the superrich have problems too: the ways to signal that you’re loaded, while also reading the room, are changing. As a therapist to the wealthy told The Cut in May, “The Birkin bags are going into hiding,” he says. “I’m seeing a lot of people increasing their security and privacy. They’re worried about being too showy, too flashy.” So what are the wealth indicators in 2025? The short answer is that it’s complicated.
If the tired but accurate term ‘quiet luxury’ has allowed this demographic to whisper wealth recently, the brands behind this look are not as much as a sure thing as they once were. See Lora Piano — the understated knitwear brand loved by the Roy family in Succession as well as actual members of the top 1 percent – which has been put under court administration this month due to alleged worker exploitation. As The Business of Fashion wrote, with requisite handwringing on behalf of people who can drop £2,245 on a jumper, “if you can’t trust Lora Piano, who can you trust?”
In this context, wealth indicators have gone from whispered to a kind of sign language, that only your own community is fluent in. Some of this comes on social media. Writing for Town & Country this month, Sheila Yasmin Marikar highlighted “proximity posting” – images that give a clue that someone has the coveted invite of the week, without being too obvious about it. An expert points to posts around the Bezos wedding as an example: “It was about being in Venice that week. The location becomes a wink to those in the know.” It’s a shift in statement. “These posts are essentially saying, ‘I have social capital, not just financial capital,’” she said.
Not all of this happens online – but wealth indicators in the wild have a similar community-only approach. One eagle-eyed observer on TikTok pointed to On trainers as “the best way to spot real art buyers at Art Basel”, for example, while much has been made of the extremely inexpensive logo’ed baseball caps worn by CEOs at the so-called ‘billionaire summer camp’, a conference thrown by the investment bank Allen & Company earlier this summer. The gag, of course, is that the logos on those caps are for companies these men own.
Of course, as anyone who has read Roland Barthes knows, we all use clothing to signal our capital – social or financial – within our cohort everyday. Accessories have long been a short cut to do this – and 2025 is no exception. Think of the Trader Joe’s canvas tote bag, an item which has become a summer fashion statement accessory in East London. If bought in the US, the tote costs $4. But the New York Times recently reported that they’re on Vinted for double that and more, due to demand. Asked about the appeal, one wearer says it signals “you’re a little bit well-travelled. Obviously, at some point, you’ve been to the States. You’ve picked up the bag. You know what’s up.”
And then there’s the Labubu, and other bag charms. If some of them have inflated prices – $150,000 for a life-sized one in June, for example – it’s the standard ones, if you can get them, that allow their wearers to indicate that social status. “Though Labubu itself is intrinsically not that expensive, the product is often shown attached to luxury lifestyles and products – seen on an expensive handbag, or attached to a celebrity,” trend forecaster Agus Panzoni told Dazed. The message? You might not be living a luxury lifestyle but when it comes to social capital, pick up the right wealth indicator and you too can feel like a millionaire.
Lauren Cochrane is Senior Fashion Writer at The Guardian and contributes to publications including The Face, ELLE, Service95, Konfekt and Mr Porter. Based in London, she writes about everything from catwalk shows to footballers’ style and the linguistics of Love Island. She is author of The Ten: The Stories Behind the Fashion Classics, and the football and fashion newsletter, Style of Play.
You can read all of Lauren’s writing on Something Curated here. Header photo: Courtesy of On Running at Art Basel.