The career of Glenn O’Brien demonstrates the crucial role of the mass media in moving trends through the cultural ecosystem. Elite conventions stay exclusive unless the media expands the common knowledge to people of lower status tiers. The Condé Nast empire of magazines, from The New Yorker to Vogue, ascended in global culture by serving this very function: providing how-to guides for the upper middle classes outside of New York, London, and Paris to keep up with the latest urban trends. And by indicating which new conventions have cachet, the mass media triggers emulation from the heaviest consumers of media—namely, the professional and creative classes. “When the movies came,” writes the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, “the entire pattern of American life went on the screen as a nonstop ad. Whatever any actor or actress wore or used or ate was such an ad as had never been dreamed of.” Mass media, then, isn’t a neutral pipe that simply relays information, but a transformative tool that strengthens conventions by broadening common knowledge and adding status value.