Consumer Identity, or: The Performance of Taste
You are not what you buy. You are what you want other people to think you buy. This is a distinction that seems trivial but is, I think, the central insight of contemporary consumer culture. The shift from consumption-as-utility to consumption-as-identity is not new — Veblen observed it at the end of the nineteenth century, Bourdieu codified it in the twentieth — but the conditions under which this performance now occurs have changed so dramatically that the old frameworks require revision. Or at the very least, a good mise à jour.
The question I want to pose is deceptively simple: when you choose a brand, what are you choosing? Not what product you are acquiring — that much is obvious. I mean: what self are you constructing? Because every purchase is, in a very real sense, a casting decision. You are auditioning objects for the role of "props in the performance of being me." And the brands that succeed are the ones that understand this audition better than their competitors.
The Wardrobe as Text
Roland Barthes, in The Fashion System, analyzed fashion magazines as semiotic systems — structures of meaning in which garments function not as objects but as signs. A "little black dress" is not a description of a garment. It is a signifier that activates an entire network of cultural associations: elegance, simplicity, Audrey Hepburn, Coco Chanel, a certain kind of Parisian femininity that may or may not have ever existed outside of cinema. You do not wear the dress. You wear the sign.
What Barthes described in the 1960s has intensified beyond anything he could have imagined. The contemporary consumer does not merely wear signs. They curate them. The Instagram outfit post, the "what's in my bag" video, the carefully photographed mise en scène of a morning coffee beside a particular book beside a particular candle — these are not casual acts of sharing. They are editorial decisions. Each object in the frame has been selected not for what it is but for what it says about the person who selected it.
I worked, briefly, with a luxury fashion house whose creative director told me something I have never forgotten: "Our customer does not buy clothes. She buys a character." He meant this literally. The brand's internal documents referred to their collections not by season but by "character arcs" — narratives in which the clothes were costumes and the customer was both actor and audience. The cynicism of this was breathtaking. The accuracy of it was worse.
Bourdieu in the Algorithm
Bourdieu's concept of habitus — the set of dispositions, tastes, and behaviors that are produced by one's class position and that in turn reproduce that position — was developed through ethnographic study of French society in the 1960s and 1970s. The habitus was shaped by family, education, geography, social milieu. It was durable but not immutable. It changed slowly, across generations.
The algorithmic feed has compressed this process into something approaching real-time. Your habitus is no longer formed over decades of socialization. It is formed — or at least supplemented — by the content you consume on TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube. The algorithm observes your taste, infers your class aspirations, and then feeds you more content that reinforces and refines those aspirations. It is a habitus-machine: a technology that produces and reproduces social distinction at industrial scale.
Consider the phenomenon of "aesthetic cores" — cottagecore, dark academia, clean girl, old money, quiet luxury, mob wife. Each is a complete semiotic system: a set of clothing, objects, spaces, behaviors, and affects that constitute a recognizable identity. Each has its own vocabulary, its own references, its own hierarchy of brands. And each is, fundamentally, a class performance — a way of signaling not just what you like but who you are and, more importantly, who you want to be.
What is remarkable is the speed at which these identities are produced, consumed, and discarded. "Quiet luxury" went from insider fashion vocabulary to mainstream cliche in approximately six months, accelerated by Succession's final season and a thousand TikTok explainers. The life cycle of a taste identity is now shorter than the shelf life of most of the products associated with it. You can adopt and abandon an entire habitus in a season.
The Paradox of Individuality
Here is the central paradox of consumer identity: the more tools we have for self-expression, the more uniform the expressions become. The promise of contemporary consumer culture is radical individuality — be yourself, express yourself, find your unique style. But the mechanism through which this individuality is achieved — algorithmic recommendation, trend cycles, influencer culture — is inherently homogenizing. You express your unique self by choosing from a menu of pre-fabricated identities that millions of others are choosing from simultaneously.
Adorno and Horkheimer described this in 1944 as "pseudo-individuation" — the culture industry's technique of producing the appearance of difference within a system of fundamental sameness. A jazz song that sounds spontaneous but is structurally identical to every other jazz song. A Hollywood film that feels fresh but follows the same three-act structure as every other Hollywood film. The parallel to contemporary consumer identity is exact: your "unique" aesthetic is unique in the same way as everyone else's unique aesthetic.
I see this most clearly in the interiors market. The "Scandinavian minimalism" that dominated the 2010s produced millions of living rooms that looked identical: white walls, light wood, a single IKEA KALLAX shelf, a monstera plant, a sheepskin throw on an Eames-style chair. Each person who assembled this room believed they were expressing their personal taste. They were, in fact, executing a collectively authored script with remarkable fidelity.
"The need to be 'different' is the most conformist need of all." — This is not a quote from any particular theorist. It is something I said at a dinner party once, slightly drunk, and I stand by it.
The Body as Brand
The performance of taste has, in recent years, extended from objects to bodies. The "clean girl" aesthetic is not just about clothing and skincare — it is about a particular kind of body: lean, tanned, with slicked-back hair and minimal visible effort. The "old money" aesthetic requires a body that appears not to have been worked on, even if it has been extensively. These are bodies-as-signs, bodies that communicate class and cultural capital as legibly as a Birkin bag.
Foucault's concept of "biopower" — the governance of populations through the regulation of bodies — finds its consumer-culture analogue in the wellness industry, which sells not health but the appearance of health as a class marker. The Pilates body. The organic diet. The "no-makeup makeup" face. Each of these is a sign that communicates discipline, resources, and the kind of leisure that is available only to those who can afford to make self-care a full-time occupation.
The brand Lululemon is perhaps the clearest example. Its products are activewear — clothing designed, ostensibly, for exercise. But the majority of Lululemon garments are never used for exercise. They are worn in contexts — the school run, the coffee shop, the airport — where their function is not athletic but semiotic. The leggings say: I am the kind of person who exercises, whether or not I am currently exercising. The brand is a sign of a lifestyle, and the lifestyle is a sign of a class.
Can You Opt Out?
The temptation, when confronted with this analysis, is to believe that one can step outside the system. I can refuse to participate in consumer identity. I can wear unbranded clothing, buy secondhand, ignore trends, cultivate an aesthetic of indifference. And indeed, a whole counter-culture of "anti-consumption" has emerged, from the désobéissance vestimentaire of the anti-fashion movement to the utilitarian wardrobes of tech billionaires in grey t-shirts.
But this, too, is a performance. The grey t-shirt of Mark Zuckerberg does not signify the absence of taste. It signifies a very specific kind of taste: the taste of someone so powerful, so beyond the game of social distinction, that they do not need to play it. The refusal to perform is the most elite performance of all. It says: I am so far above the system of signs that I can afford to ignore it. Which is, of course, the most powerful sign within that system.
Bourdieu identified this as the strategy of the dominant class: to present their taste as "natural," as beyond strategy, as simply the way things are. The working class tries hard and is visible in its effort. The middle class tries hard and attempts to conceal the effort. The upper class appears not to try at all — and this appearance of effortlessness is the most carefully constructed performance of them all.
The Self as Portfolio
Where does this leave us? In a condition I would describe as permanent audition. The contemporary consumer is always performing, always curating, always constructing a self through the accumulation and display of signs. The tools for this performance — social media, fast fashion, the infinite accessibility of cultural references — have made identity construction faster, cheaper, and more fluid than at any point in history. You can be anyone. The only thing you cannot be is no one.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has written about the "achievement society" in which the subject is no longer disciplined from without — as in Foucault's model — but exploits itself from within. The imperative is not "you must" but "you can." You can optimize your body, your wardrobe, your living space, your personal brand. And because you can, you feel that you must. The freedom to construct your identity becomes the obligation to do so, endlessly, across every platform and in every domain of life.
I think of my own apartment in the 11th. I have told myself that my collection of mid-century ceramics reflects my genuine interest in postwar French design. And perhaps it does. But when I photograph one of those ceramics beside a cup of coffee and a copy of Barthes for my Instagram story — well. What am I doing then? Am I sharing something I love, or am I constructing a version of myself that I want to be seen?
The honest answer is: both. And the inability to separate the two is not a failure of self-knowledge. It is the condition of living in a culture where identity and consumption have become — perhaps irreversibly — the same thing.
So tell me: when was the last time you bought something that was not, in some way, a performance?