The Eternal Allure of Wearable Wealth
The Eternal Allure of Wearable Wealth
Words by Saba Imtiaz Illustrated by Yulia Nidbalskaya
Throughout human history, money hasn’t just been used to buy clothing—it’s been incorporated into the very fabric of fashion itself.
On a Thursday evening in September 2018, the reality TV star Kim Kardashian West attended a party in L.A. wearing the following items of clothing: a vintage Jeremy Scott trench coat, Balenciaga boots, and a glittering bag by Judith Leiber. The thing that bound her look together: money. Everything screamed money; the trench and boots were covered in a dollar-bill print, and the bag featured a large, sparkly dollar sign. West was dressing for success: the party was in celebration of makeup mogul Anastasia Soare, whose company, Anastasia Beverly Hills, reportedly had sold a minority stake in a deal that could value the business at up to $3 billion, according to CNBC.
“What do you do when your friend sells her company for a couple billion?” Kardashian West said. “You wear a full money fit and throw her a party. Okcurrr!”
West might have lit the fire of the clickbait headline machine—“Kim Kardashian Looks Like a Billion Bucks in Money Dress and Matching Boots,” via Entertainment Tonight—but her outfit was rooted in a long, global history of people wearing money, literally and symbolically, to celebrate things.
In parts of India and Pakistan, garlands made of local rupees adorn the necks of grooms at weddings. Polynesian leis include American dollar bills folded into floral shapes.
Wearing and rolling around in and showing off money has been immortalized in Western popular culture, from depictions of Scrooge McDuck diving into gold coins in his vault to First Lady Melania Trump, who was photographed with a bowl of jewelry for the cover of Vanity Fair’s Mexico edition in 2017.
When West was robbed at gunpoint in her Paris hotel in 2016, the Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld blamed the reality-show star and her public flaunting of her profligacy. “You cannot display your wealth and then be surprised that some people want to share it with you,” he told reporters.
Yet the practice of wearing money is a part of everyday language: the word “sequin,” as author and professor Jack Weatherford points out in the 1998 book The History of Money, derives from the practice of stitching gold and silver coins onto cloth, or using them as jewelry.
To continue reading, please go to the original article here: