Why Looking Expensive Means Less Now
I was once told, by my great uncle Norman, a man adept at gauging his audience with an uncanny charm, that you could tell how much money someone had by the weight of their coat. Not the brand. The weight. Wool costs money. Lining costs money. Buttons that do not melt in the rain cost money. You didn’t need a logo. You needed gravity.
That was the old contract. Objects told the truth because they were hard to fake. A car had to be bought. A suit had to be tailored. A watch had to be serviced by a man with a loupe and an opinion. When someone said “that coat is expensive,” it was an observation that the person had stature.
Fast forward to today, and perception’s a menu, available to rent.
“How expensive do you want to appear?” is the real question. You can lease the car, finance the watch, buy the hoodie that signals wealth by pretending not to care about it. You can look like money for the price of a short holiday, provided the colours are muted and the branding discreet. Status signalling has become cheap, flexible, and oddly tiring.
Signalling stopped being constrained by materials.
Manufacturing scaled. Credit softened commitment. Brands learned that identity sells better than durability. The internet finished the job by turning taste into a feed. Once everyone could see everything, ownership mattered less than projection. Clothing stopped placing you in a system and started expressing intention. Cars followed. Once declarations of role, now mood boards on wheels. Wrapped, debadged, carefully ambiguous.
The interesting shift is not aesthetic, but in the morality.
When position was legible, comparison had limits. You knew who you were comparing yourself to. When identity became performative, comparison went feral.
Everyone competes with everyone else’s edited self. Anxiety thrives in that fog. Personal identity has rushed in to replace societal position.
We curate instead of inherit. That feels liberating until you notice the maintenance cost. If status is something you are, it rests with you. If it is something you perform, it never quite lets you sit down.
Businesses have copied this mistake almost perfectly.
Many still behave as if signalling works the old way. Spend heavily on the surface. Brand films, tone-of-voice documents, the right cultural references. Then quietly economise underneath. Support queues stretch.
The coat looks expensive. The stitching fails the first time it rains.
The uncommon sense? It's a false economy.
When customers could not see inside an organisation, projection carried weight. Now they see everything:
- Response times.
- Error handling.
- How you behave when something breaks. The gap between what you signal and what you do is no longer hidden. It is the product.
Most teams think they are signalling premium. What they are actually signalling is decoration. Premium has always meant:
- Fewer surprises.
- Predictable quality.
- Boring reliability delivered with quiet confidence. Decoration without consistency simply raises expectations you cannot meet.
**Customers are not really comparing you to competitors in the way strategy decks suggest. **
They are measuring friction. How much effort it takes to deal with you when things are ordinary, and how painful it is when they are not. This is where premium still sits. Not in excellence everywhere, just in the absence of sudden surprises. No sharp edges or moments where the economics of the operation leak through the façade.
The irony is that this kind of premium is often cheaper.
- It comes from restraint.
- Fewer promises. Fewer variants.
- Clearer rules.
- A narrower sense of who you are for. The organisations that struggle are usually trying to look flexible and bespoke while running systems built for speed and volume. They signal care and deliver throughput.
In a world where identity is performative, customers stop listening to what you say and watch what repeats. What happens every time. What happens on a Tuesday afternoon. What happens when no one is looking.
The old coat was heavy because it had to be. The new coat is the one you've been seen wearing for a while.
At subversive, we show businesses how to think different, and build their unfair advantages into premium experiences.