"All that glitters is not gold": fashion consumption and materialism in America's Gilded Age

• Main Author: Khudsia, Muamina
• Other Authors: Christopher Peter Trigg
• Format: Student Research Paper
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2025
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/182798
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The 2022 Met Gala drew widespread criticism from the public and fashion pundits alike for misrepresenting the ‘Gilded Glamour’ theme, an ode to the late 19th and early 20th-century American Gilded Age. Many designers and celebrities glorified its opulence and glamour, neglecting the widening wealth disparity and economic instability caused by conspicuous consumption and materialism. In fact, the Gilded Age was a term coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 satirical novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, to critique the underlying rapacious corruption within the lavish capitalistic American society. Through an in-depth examination of the mass consumerist culture in American naturalistic works such as Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, the study seeks to uncover the relationship between the consumption habits of the different social classes and their influence upon their lives. Notably, the novels reveal the protagonists’ hyper-fixation on transcending their positions with superficial and excessive fashion consumption, compromising their moral values in the process. The characters’ efforts at upward mobility using clothes eventually conclude with a crushing realisation of their inability to overcome their predestined fates, thereby rendering them powerless against insidious social forces. Such tragic outcomes in the Gilded Age narratives ultimately highlight fashion as an illusory symbol of American individualism.