Their sprawling mansions are filled with luxury furniture and personal staffers, designer clothes are delivered to their doorstops every day, and their closets are overflowing with the trendiest handbags. They’re the wealthiest one percent of the population, and they have the other 99 percent captivated.
Whether reality or fiction, the lives of America’s elite have continued to become a subject of interest to the middle class, eager for a glimpse of how the other half lives.
Certain television shows have gained popularity in recent years for showcasing extravagant lifestyles and big spenders. Shows like “Gossip Girl,” “The Hills,” and “The Real Housewives” series exhibit the lives of American socialites whose financial decisions ultimately come down to convenience over price.
“Do I know if that’s a fair price or not? No,” Kim Zolciak, star of “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” confides to the camera while buying a Cadillac Escalade. “Am I driving off the lot in five minutes? Yes.’ ”
“Budget? What’s that?” Sheree Whitfield brags, another of the housewives, in the same episode.
Few would agree that these sentiments reflect the spending habits of most Americans, professor Deborah Andrews, Director of the Center for Material Culture Studies, says. But they do give insight into widely held cultural beliefs about money.
“Americans have very conflicted, confused, interesting attitudes towards money because as a culture, so much of who we are depends on what we possess and how much money we have,” Andrews says. “We see all these CEOs getting enormous, excessive salaries, and we say, ‘Isn’t that terrible?’ but we also think, ‘Well maybe I could be like them and I could have that much money too,’ because we can be whoever we want to be in our culture.”
Despite the nation’s current economic state, in which the national unemployment rate is 9.5 percent and frivolous spending is frowned upon, television shows about extravagance continue to thrive.
The premiere of the second season of “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” this August drew more viewers than any other season in the “Real Housewives” series, according to Bravotv.com. This suggests that the economic recession has done little to deter viewers from shows about luxury lifestyles.
The draw of shows like “Real Housewives” and “Gossip Girl” is to this economic recession what “The Great Gatsby” was to the Great Depression, Andrews says.
“Maybe the people on these shows are attractive because they’re so unlike us or because afterwards we can say, ‘Oh they’re such terrible people, we’re not like them, we’re better than these people,” she says. “Or maybe people are looking for a mode of escapism and will think, ‘Well we can always imagine for an hour that we’re living those lives, living in the big houses and carrying those purses.’”
Freshman Emily Hubbard, who watches “Gossip Girl” and “The Hills,” says they exhibit unrealistic ideas about youth and money.
“It’s ridiculous,” Hubbard says. “Most of them don’t have to worry about getting jobs because their parents are already rich and they can just go around spending it on whatever they want. I don’t think that’s the situation for most college kids.”
Hubbard says while she takes the shows with a grain of salt, she thinks they have the possibility of negatively impacting the young audiences that watch them.
“It probably encourages kids to want be like that and want to spend money like that,” she says. “It’s something to aspire to even though it shouldn’t be.”
Sophomore Becky Trexler says she doesn’t watch the shows because they are unrealistic portrayals of how people live their lives.
“If they are on, I just sit there and say, ‘This is stupid,’ ” Trexler says. “You can’t take these people seriously. They don’t t reflect most people’s attitudes about money.”
Andrews says people take a particular interest in shows that feature extravagant spending and posh lifestyles.
“Money is a kind of drug in a way,” Andrews says. “So much of our sense of self as Americans can be tied up with money. These shows reflect a cultural love of money.”
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