Want to look like a billion dollars? Social media is here to help.
Daily, hourly, seemingly by the second, content creators with handles including Fresh & Classy, Carving Pierre and Kiki Astor offer tips on how their followers can project wealth, even if they don’t have much money.
“It makes perfect sense to me as a fantasy,” said Daniel Hakimi, a lawyer on Long Island who runs the Second Button, a website and Instagram account that gives advice on how to achieve the look of someone whose clothes are custom-made.
In all likelihood, this fascination has existed in some form ever since social groups began to be sorted by social rank and income. Yet it seems to have grown more intense at a time when unimaginable wealth is increasingly concentrated in a tiny and all-but-invisible population.
“As we get poorer, we are more obsessed with the aesthetics of wealth,” Mr. Hakimi, 35, said.
Alex Gavin Rambet has built a following of nearly 400,000 for his Instagram account, Old Money, which has the motto: “Join the Old Money Lifestyle and Dress With Class.” Mr. Rambet, 21, regularly drills down into the finer points of which shoes, ties, suits and even manners are required to convey an aura of high net worth.
“Fashion has always been aspirational,” he said.
Another influencer, Mads Mura, schools an audience of more than 100,000 in the attainment of old-money folkways through a series of how-to reels on his stately Instagram account, Carter Beau.
Speaking by phone from London, Mr. Mura, 25, offered a theory on why this kind of thing is gaining traction: “What’s happening is that we are in a moment of cultural exhaustion, a decade dominated by street culture, outgoing and loud, and we have hit a wall with it.”
“For me,” he added, “it’s not just about the way people dress. It’s about how you present yourself, how you respect people, how you express your manners.”
Mr. Mura may not have known he was echoing the words of social arbiters from a time long before social media, when tips from the pundits Emily Post and Miss Manners helped newspaper readers clamber up the class ladder. The apotheosis of the type is surely Martha Stewart, the acknowledged O.G. of class-inscribed self-optimization.
If previous generations doled out sartorial and etiquette tips by the genteel teaspoon, social media has unleashed a fire hose. The consensus among arbiters of today holds that prominently displayed logos are tacky, that colors should be hushed and that monochrome outfits telegraph sophistication. They also place great emphasis on the meticulous grooming of nails, skin and hair.
In upper-class circles of old, much of this would have been quietly passed down through the generations. These days, the finer points of achieving an air of sophistication reach a wider audience through more democratic means.
“Gen Z didn’t get a lot of this knowledge that traveled through families, mentorships, institutions,” Mr. Mura said. “A lot of that lore got lost. Social media is filling the gap and resurfacing information a generation was starved of.”
Old Money Secrets, another social media account of this type, comprises videos featuring a silver-haired gent who dispenses advice in a plummy accent on what he terms “old-money manners.” The posts are the stuff of a novel by John O’Hara: He who speaks first loses; buy land while others chase trends; no one ever got truly rich by being an employee.
Filippo Ricci, a scion of the family behind the Stefano Ricci label, whose clientele skews toward those who count their net worth in the billions, seemed skeptical of the notion that the looks and manners of the wealthy could be picked up online.
“There are all these websites and social media accounts, even subscription sites, telling you how to get dressed and appear different, richer — though it’s always better not to run after something you’re not,” Mr. Ricci said.
“The reality is, the authentically rich don’t shop to appear rich,” he added. “For those people, rich is not a costume.”
Guy Trebay is a reporter for the Style section of The Times, writing about the intersections of style, culture, art and fashion.
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