Poorgeoisie

Those who conceal their affluence with a (carefully crafted) down-at-heel look.

Inviting readers to “meet the poorgeoisie” in recent feature for men.style.com, Steve Kandell declared, “they dress like hoboes but spend like millionaires”:

While Wall Street’s hedge-funders have become whipping boys, those who have mastered the art of inconspicuous consumption are living as large as ever. But they’re not easy to spot, resembling, as they do, Trotskyite grad students – a look that doesn’t come cheap: $300 Acne jeans, $175 hand-stitched guayabera shirt, $150 mussed haircut with beard trim (not too short, please). This brand of consumerism escapes condemnation – it’s okay to be a capitalist pig as long as you’re the sort who roots around in your organic garden for truffles.

The Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries explained:

The poorgeoisie are the countercultural rich who have adopted a form of consumerism against consumerism, a way of spending to make themselves look as though they haven’t spent. It’s a new way for rich people who don’t want to seem rich to buy their way out of the guilt and shame of having money at a time of mass economic woe. It’s a way of being rich but remaining undetected. Poorgeois: it’s just the thing to be in these credit-crunch times if you don’t want anyone to know how flush and smug you’re feeling. …

But here is a paradox of the poorgeoisie: the poorgeois don’t want their camouflage to go unnoticed by everybody. If only Roland Barthes were alive to write about the subtle sartorial semiology of thepoorgeoisie. Yes, they don’t want to get filled in for being too rich by people on the fuzzy end of the credit-crunch lollipop, but they do want to impress their peers with their good taste.

See also: Stealth Wealth.