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.

Mass media and mass manufacturers, however, do speed up fashion cycles by ensuring we become aware of trends beyond what we can directly observe and by removing the obstacles to participation. This quickly turns little-known conventions into broad social norms. Companies are able to make this happen because they understand the fundamental human desire for status markers. Marxists complain that capitalism creates “false needs,” as capitalists chase “exchange value” over earnest “use value.” The flaw in this analysis is that a primary use for goods is marking social distinction.