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Comment by lmg643 | Hacker News Reader

I will agree the value of a put-together appearance is valid, in many contexts. and i wouldn't take from that at all.

However ... it's ridiculous to use this to defend a $2,500 handbag purchase. the purchase was inadvisable at best.

marshall's, target, JCP etc have a massive business strategy around making sophisticated looks available on a low budget. so there are plenty of ways to accomplish the objective of self respect, presentation and budget.

there's an old essay by tom wolfe called "mau mauing the flak catchers" - watching the CEO of barney's defending himself, I think that fits just about perfectly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Chic_&_Mau-Mauing_the_F...

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I agree. Two different things being discussed as one.

1) Everyone should have at least one outfit that is super classy. A cheap solution is a Salvation Army or Goodwill store in a nice part of town.

2) People who live on the dole and buy things they clearly don't need or deserve. Rocking an iPhone 5 while using your food stamp debit card at the grocery store to buy junk food is the typical "Stupid" poor person move most people hate to see. There's no justification for that.

Man, the iPhone 5 really is not a very good example here.

If you wear your super classy outfit to an interview AND you have the iPhone 5 instead of a prepaid Android phone (or worse -- a prepaid non-smartphone), it's going to show that you "belong" and that you're not poor.

Some people really do pay attention to what kind of phone you have, particularly for these gateway-straddling jobs that the author talks about in the article.

Counterpoint: after the novelty of wearing the super classy outfit and waving the iPhone 5 wears off once you have a job, what else do you now have to purchase -- outside your means -- to convince your co-workers that you "belong"?

It would be cheaper to look for a job in an environment that is more interested in what you can do rather than what you tote.

That is, after all, what most of us end up doing.

That's not a counterpoint in poor-person logic. It's a counterpoint in you-the-guy-who-has-more-correct-assumptions logic.

This is what I'm trying to get across with my posts on this topic.

People keep using reasoning from within a higher-class group where you already know the rules and assumptions of the game. The whole point is that the people below don't.

It would be awesome if HR people only ever judged people on skill, and not on appearance or presentation. But if there's one big takeaway from this article, it's that there really are gatekeepers that filter people based on whether they "belong". Faking that belonging can be incredibly important to escape the poverty trap.

You probably genuinely do believe that, but the tech industry is notorious for superficial judgements - consider that you would know exactly what I meant if I described someone as a "suit". Maybe he's just a guy who likes to dress well? Maybe he was born in a more conservative culture and that's just what people wear? But God help him if he shows up to the interview in it.

Want to be really classy in an interview? Leave your smart, dumb or average phone at home.

They aren't talking about using a phone in an interview.

A smart phone is a valuable tool for a professional. Being able to send an email or call from the road when you're running late, or to receive same when your counterpart is running late - people expect this nowadays.

Of course, during the actual interview, it should go without saying to put it on silent and leave it in your pocket or purse.

>Man, the iPhone 5 really is not a very good example here. The iPhone 5 is a great example. The iPhone 3gs or 4 is hardly distinguishable and costs 1/5 the price. You cannot play some high end games with those phones, but that shouldn't prevent one's economic improvement.

buy things they clearly don't need or deserve.

Deserve? Where does deserve come into this? Posessing money makes it easy to aquire things, but having it or lacking it doesn't say anything about if someone deserves something or not.

>Posessing money makes it easy to aquire things

Flat out wrong. There are three ways to acquire things:

- Trade (with money or goods of value)

- Beg

- Steal

I ordered that list in order of HARDEST to EASIEST way to acquire things.

You are a loony. If I walk into a shop with a ton of money, then I can walk out with far more stuff and with much less effort than trying to steal from the shop or beg for free stuff from it.

Deserve?

Are you making a moral judgement about income?

About income, no. About stealing yes.

If you are on the dole and you are a buying things that aren't necessary to survive, you are stealing.

A relative of mine owns several condos and some of his renters are "Section 8". The state pays for 90% of their rent, they only need to come up with 10%. One guy who couldn't come up with his 10% (and got evicted) had an xbox connected to a big screen TV. How is that not stealing?

If you take money from others to pay for your food or for your rent you don't deserve an xbox, a TV, an iPhone 5. You deserve to go the public library and learn something to make yourself more marketable. You deserve to work 3 jobs until you can pay your own way for necessities.

Here's a trick: get your measurements, accurately, have someone do it for you with a tape measure. Then scour eBay and be patient. Eventually a suit that was hand-made for someone of your exact dimensions will come up, then you have to grab it. Whatever you pay won't be a fraction even of what it cost originally.

That implies the following: -you have a computer -you have internet -you have an email address -you have any idea what ebay is (no seriously...that's not a reasonable assumption to make) -you have the money to buy THAT suit (oh, and a credit card and a paypal account) -you have somewhere safe to have it shipped -you even understand the lingo of suiting enough to what to look for.

The company I currenlty work for recently hired a technician. The role is something we would call technical today but probably 15 years ago would have been the product of a vocational education. Those programs have been eliminated and pushed on companies to train for instead, companies that usually want experience before they will train. This week, our new guy (24 years old, self supporting, has a kid and a house) sent his first email. Obviously not all of these apply to every situation but the level of abstraction required to understand why this makes no sense to people like us isn't easy for most people.

Unfortunately, when the very thing you're trying to do is status signaling, it's not how "sophisticated" your outfit looks nearly so much as it is the brands in your outfit. High-end brands signal status by their very high-end-ness. An off-brand, but sophisticated outfit signals far less status than a perhaps less sophisticated, but visibly branded outfit, assuming the "right" brand.

It probably depends on the circles one is attempting to break into, but my selection bias of reading/interacting with the fairly affluent really don't put much stock into brands. In general, the brand-ists I come by, typically are those yet to have "made it" that have nothing better to base their judgements on.

The problem is that when you're aiming at a group that's higher than you, you don't know exactly what they do and don't know and what they can and can't tell the difference between. Thus, you may think that you have to have something extremely nice and not just simply nice. Additionally, the huge name brand over the acceptable-looking thing may buy you status within your own group, not just the group you're trying to move into.

There are countless movies having 2 well-dressed people side-by-side where the "in" person looks at the new person in the group and says "Get rid of that cheap suit." or similar.

The problem is that while you and me know that you can get away with the cheaper stuff as long as it's well-pressed, clean, etc., not everybody is sure of that.

Certainly true. There are very nice designer handbags for a fraction. Even if you think the $300-500 brands aren't good enough (Coach, Marc, Kate Spade, etc), there are even more in the $800-1200 range (Louis Vuitton, for one..)

I know this because I have a wife with tastes for such things :)

Then you should have her check out Lollipuff (YC W13): designer auctions pre-screened by experts for authenticity (ie. eBay without the fakes). It also amazes us. Why would people pay full price when the "lightly used" ones sell for 80% off?

*Disclaimer: Am a founder of Lollipuff.

I'd wager it's the same reasoning people buy new cars or new consumer electronics.

And what is that reasoning? Unlike cars and electronics, many designer goods hold their value over time, and some even appreciate.

FWIW, my wife was delighted when I sent her to Lollipuff yesterday. She thinks it's a great idea.

I guess one thought is that I don't know if I would ever gift her a used bag. Even if I trusted the source (which has always been a deal breaker before).

But her buying for herself, I can see her definitely purchasing something previously owned.

Do you think that people who buy expensive stuff -- the gatekeepers in the original article -- can't tell the difference? That they don't know brand names?

The goal isn't to meet some objective standard of looks-close-enough. The goal is to signal in a very specific way, through brand names. You may impress other poor people who don't know about brand names and such, but you will not impress people who do know their stuff.

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