ABSTRACT
Not following the rules for dress may, in some cases for certain people, be a way to show and gain higher status. There are social rules for how to dress to show status. Historically, people showed how much money they had by wearing clothing that obviously displayed their wealth to anyone who saw them. The idea of "conspicuous consumption," buying and displaying things to show how rich people are, is a concept that has been around for more than a century. Clothing itself used to be clearly ranked by social class. The upper classes wore certain things and the middle and working classes wore other things. In this way, tastes and preferences in clothing were embedded with clear markers of class status, or cultural capital. As more people wore jeans, jeans themselves became ranked and divided based on status, as did the people who wore them.
