In Defense of the Materialistic Diva

I’ve always loved things—the transformative power of a princess costume, your grandmother’s favorite purse, a half-finished Diptyque candle, a cherry-red lipstick worn down to a nub. I’m a notorious overpacker, and even still, I find myself missing my stuff, all the stuff, on a weekend away. Am I materialistic? Absolutely, but unlike several ex-boyfriends, I’ve never seen it as a personal flaw. Sure, it can swing that way if left unchecked, as any personality trait can when brought to the extreme. There’s something empowering about enjoying life’s little luxuries; something delightful and simple about the inner peace I get from a thick face cream or a studded leather belt. To me, it’s not about consumption so much as it is the ability to instill meaning into the mundane, to either inspire or comfort with just a single item.

It turns out I’m not alone. In today’s never-ending onslaught of bad news, political terrors, and economic crises, the comfort and allure of, well, stuff has never been greater. The ability to find joy in the unimportant, to revel in the ridiculousness, finally seems to be en vogue. After all, in a capitalistic society that often feels on the brink of absolute destruction, we might as well enjoy what we can.

While today’s version looks a bit different, materialism is a time-honored American tradition, far beyond simply keeping up with the Joneses (whoever your particular Joneses may be). While historians and scholars disagree on the exact roots of American consumerism, it can largely be traced back to the mass production boom of the 1920s. As historian Frederick Lewis Allen put it in Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, “Business had learned as never before the importance of the ultimate consumer. Unless he could be persuaded to buy and buy lavishly, the whole stream of six-cylinder cars, super heterodynes, cigarettes, rouge compacts, and electric ice boxes would be dammed up at its outlets.” Consumer desire was framed as a means of societal progress, boosting economic growth and modern manufacturing; a noble cause, to say the least. The era, however, was short-lived, abbreviated by the onset of the Great Depression and World War II.

It would be the deprivation of those very events that spurred America’s second wave of materialistic lust in the 1950s. With the federal government’s help, mass manufacturing was back in business with the expansion of housing, road building, durable goods, and household appliances. Consumerism was seen as downright patriotic, contributing to American success at large. Retail analyst Victor Lebow commented on the state of materialism in 1955: “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. … We need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.” Suddenly, a deep concern and longing for material possessions was integral to being a good American. Materialism was the American way.

The next few decades brought on more of the same, further solidifying the importance of stuff—and lots of it—in American culture. This gave way to the wealth-obsessed 1980s, during which conspicuous consumption and Wall Street greed reigned supreme, and Madonna’s “Material Girl” topped the charts. In a 1987 Washington Post article, journalist Haynes Johnson likened the consumer culture to that of the 1920s: “Not since the 1920s, a decade that these Teflon Years of the 1980s increasingly resemble, has the nation witnessed so much common celebration of greed and selfishness. … Private gain has been accorded a higher value than public service. ‘Making it’ has been the era’s slogan.” Materialism and consumption became a way of life—proof of a well-lived life.

Of course, all this—from the 1920s and on—was almost exclusively available to wealthy white people at the time, mainly white men. But that didn’t stop Black and Latinx communities from embracing materialism as a way to stake a claim to that which had been denied for so long. This can be seen in everything from the Zoot Suits of the Jazz Age to early hip-hop culture in the 1970s and ’80s. For many people of color, conspicuous consumption became an act of cultural expression and a means of validation, proving stereotypes wrong.

Into the ’90s and beyond, the tide began to turn. Materialism, a trait once drilled into the American psyche, became proof of temporal and moral fault, especially when it came to women and minorities. Across Western media, a parade of seemingly shallow, materialistic women served as cautionary tales of how not to behave. Cher Horowitz, Blair Waldorf, Samantha Jones, Andy Sachs, Gaby Solis, and Toni Childs were all characters who weren’t necessarily received positively when they first debuted, but their legacies have only grown in the years since.

At the same time, the McBling aesthetic of the early to mid-2000s—with its bold, blinged-out fashion—seemed to celebrate and indulge materialism, with artists like Cam’ron and designers like Kimora Lee Simmons leaning into unabashed, ostentatious luxury. Think gold chains, designer logos, and lots of glitter. It wasn’t long before their white counterparts joined in on the trend. Hand in hand with the rise of reality television, materialism experienced a real-life renaissance. While many attempted to frame it as a fatal flaw—who can forget the countless think pieces that treated The Simple Life and The Girls Next Door as the end of civilization as we know it?—pop culture seemed to embrace materialism full-force.

In an increasingly precarious world, one in which most young people feel uncertain about their abilities to build the lives those before us were able to create, materialism seems to offer a sense of escape and momentary bliss from life’s cruel realities. It seems hardly coincidental that the last major era of materialistic consumption coincided with war and an economic recession.

I admit, the surface-level consumer habits that come with being a material girl are undoubtedly nefarious—and we haven’t even touched the environmental and political implications of so much stuff. We can’t simply rely on material goods to fix very real problems in the world; we should continue to advocate for change, particularly from our government and institutions. And while all the things and stuff in the world could never actually fill the holes in our hearts, what’s so wrong with finding joy in a pair of zebra-printed sneakers or a limited-edition Glossier claw clip?

The materialism I advocate for is an act of self-preservation through joy, however momentary that joy may be. It’s not about the things themselves as much as it’s their ability to transform us and our worlds. It’s this version of materialism—one that finds pockets of brightness even in the darkest of times—that I fully embrace. Sometimes, it doesn’t have to be so complicated: Life is hard, and pretty things help us get by. What’s so wrong with that?

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