Things That Were Once Status Symbols
People have always found ways to flaunt their social status and wealth.
These days, it could be a high-end vehicle or a high-end purse.
It was all about the largest television or the appropriate watch a few decades ago.
However, the status symbols that people sought become utterly strange if you go back far enough in time.
We’re talking about hiring hermits to live in your garden, renting fruit for parties, and flaunting your costly incapacity to walk properly.
Nor were they merely oddball fads.
They were significant indicators of wealth that had the power to positively or negatively impact your social standing.
Scarcity, cost, and prevailing cultural values all influence what constitutes a status symbol, which is always changing.
The more obscure the symbol, the more it reveals about people’s values and social roles.
Let’s examine some of the most odd status symbols that used to be very important but now seem completely ridiculous.
Pineapples
In the 18th century, if you really wanted to impress your dinner guests, you needed a pineapple.
Not to eat, mind you.
Just to display on your table while it slowly rotted away.
When Christopher Columbus brought the first pineapples back from the Caribbean in 1493, Europeans went wild for this exotic fruit.
The sweet, tropical flavor was unlike anything they’d tasted, and the spiky crown gave it a regal appearance that earned it the nickname ‘King of Fruits.’
The problem was getting pineapples to Europe.
They spoiled quickly during long sea voyages, making them incredibly rare.
Growing them in cold European climates proved nearly impossible until gardeners developed specialized heated glasshouses called pineries in the 17th century.
Even then, cultivating a single pineapple could take years and cost a fortune in heating and maintenance.
A single pineapple could cost the equivalent of $8,000 in today’s money.
Only royalty and the extremely wealthy could afford them.
King Charles II commissioned a painting of himself receiving the first pineapple grown on English soil, treating it like a coronation.
The most absurd part was the pineapple rental market.
People who couldn’t afford to buy a pineapple could rent one for an evening to carry around at parties, pretending they owned it.
The same pineapple might be rented to multiple people before finally being sold for consumption once it started going bad.
Pineapples appeared carved into gateposts, sculpted atop buildings, and woven into fabrics.
By the 1770s, calling something ‘a pineapple of the finest flavor’ meant it was the best of the best.
The obsession only faded when improved shipping and Hawaiian plantations made pineapples commonplace by the early 1900s.
Elaborate Sugar Sculptures
For centuries, sugar was rare and expensive, making it the ultimate luxury item.
Wealthy hosts in medieval and Renaissance Europe didn’t just serve sugar.
They created elaborate sculptures called subtleties, entirely molded from sugar, as centerpieces at banquets.
These weren’t small decorations either.
Subtleties could be massive, intricate works of art depicting castles, ships, mythological scenes, or political allegories.
At King Henry VI’s coronation, each course was followed by a subtlety that reinforced the king’s divine right to rule.
One Chancellor of Oxford opened a banquet with a sugar sculpture of the entire university, complete with a sugar chancellor, sugar professors, and a sugar king, all positioned to present Latin verses.
The sculptures sometimes mocked political enemies or religious figures, serving as edible propaganda.
Creating these masterpieces required skilled artisans and enormous quantities of expensive sugar, proving the host’s wealth and power.
The Victorians even blackened their teeth intentionally to show they could afford enough sugar to cause cavities.
That particular trend mercifully died out, but sugar’s association with wealth persisted well into the modern era.
Ridiculously Long Pointed Shoes
Fashion has always involved some degree of impracticality, but 15th-century Europe took it to extremes with crackowes.
These shoes featured pointed tips called poulaines that extended anywhere from six to twenty-four inches beyond the wearer’s actual toes.
The longer the point, the wealthier and more important you were supposed to be.
The logic was simple.
If you could afford to wear shoes so absurdly impractical that walking, climbing stairs, or doing any useful work became nearly impossible, you clearly didn’t need to work at all.
Edward III of England even passed laws regulating shoe length by social class.
Commoners were restricted to six-inch points, gentlemen could wear fifteen-inch tips, and nobility could go as long as they pleased.
Some wealthy individuals had tips so long they needed to be tied up to the knee with chains to prevent tripping.
The trend eventually died out, probably because people got tired of constantly falling over.
Still, it perfectly captures how status symbols often prioritize showing off wealth over any practical consideration.
The more inconvenient something is, the more it proves you don’t need to concern yourself with mundane concerns like mobility.
White Collars and Cuffs
During the 16th and 17th centuries, people believed water spread disease.
Bathing was considered dangerous, so people avoided it.
Instead, they relied on clean linen undergarments to keep their bodies fresh.
The thinking went that regularly changing your shirt absorbed dirt and sweat more effectively than the steam baths of ancient times.
Since you couldn’t show off your clean underwear in polite society, white collars and cuffs became visible proof of cleanliness and moral virtue.
Maintaining pristine white collars required enormous effort and expense.
The collars needed to be starched, which involved applying starch water and then carefully inserting heated iron rods into the pleated flutes without scorching the delicate fabric.
One slip with a too-hot iron and the whole thing was ruined.
Servants spent hours on this task, and only wealthy households could afford the time, materials, and expertise required.
The elaborate ruffs worn by Elizabethan nobility took this concept to ridiculous extremes.
With collars so large and stiff they made eating difficult.
These uncomfortable accessories announced to everyone that the wearer had enough money to maintain impractical clothing and enough servants to help put it on each morning.
Hired Hermits and Ornamental Ruins
Eighteenth-century English and German nobles believed no estate was complete without a hermitage.
Not a real one where actual religious hermits lived, but a fake one they built specifically as a garden ornament.
Then they hired someone to play the role of hermit.
This wasn’t a quiet caretaker job either.
The hired hermit was essentially an actor whose duties included looking disheveled, carrying heavy books, jumping out to startle guests, and delivering philosophical speeches.
Some contracts specified how long the hermit’s hair and fingernails had to grow.
Even stranger were follies, massive ornamental structures built to look like ancient castle ruins.
These served no practical purpose whatsoever beyond entertaining rich guests who could tour the fake ruins and hear made-up legends about them.
Wealthy landowners spent fortunes constructing and maintaining these elaborate fantasies.
The whole concept resembles modern theme parks or historical reenactments, except it was exclusively for showing off to other wealthy people.
The more useless and expensive your decorative fake ruin with its resident performer hermit, the more impressed your peers would be.
It perfectly demonstrates how status symbols often involve conspicuous waste, proving you have so much money you can spend it on completely pointless things.
Board Games
Today, board games are casual entertainment for family game nights.
In ancient times, they were diplomatic gifts exchanged between rulers to demonstrate status and power.
The earliest board games featured splendid playing pieces made from precious materials like ivory, gold, and gemstones.
Owning an elaborate game set signaled that you belonged to the elite class with leisure time and refined tastes.
Historian Mark Hall noted that many first board games appear to have been diplomatic gifts specifically designed to signify status.
Archaeological evidence shows that privileged people owned particularly magnificent gaming pieces, turning what we now consider simple entertainment into demonstrations of wealth and political connections.
The games themselves often came from distant lands, adding exotic appeal to their prestige value.
Giving or receiving an ornate game set was less about playing and more about acknowledging social hierarchy and forging alliances between powerful families.
The shift from status symbol to mass-market entertainment only happened relatively recently in human history, as manufacturing made elaborate game sets affordable for ordinary people.
Pale Skin to Tanned Skin
Skin tone is one of the few status symbols whose meaning has been entirely inverted.
Pale skin has long been associated with wealth and prestige in a variety of cultures.
The logic was simple.
You didn’t work in the fields outside if you were pale.
You could afford to stay inside and avoid the sun.
You were identified as an outside laborer or peasant if your skin was darker and more tanned.
Women used parasols, stayed inside during the strongest sunlight, and occasionally applied hazardous whitening cosmetics to preserve porcelain complexions.
The complete reversal came in the 1920s when Coco Chanel accidentally got too much sun during a Mediterranean cruise.
Rather than hide her tan, she embraced it, and fashionable society followed.
By that time, working-class people increasingly worked indoors in factories and offices.
A suntan became proof that you could afford leisure time at the beach or on vacation.
The bronzed look signified wealth and free time rather than manual labor.
This flip demonstrates how status symbols depend entirely on scarcity and cultural context.
What marks you as wealthy in one era can mark you as poor in another, and the change can happen within a single generation.
Looking back at these peculiar status symbols reveals something fundamental about human nature.
We’re constantly finding new ways to signal our place in social hierarchies, and the markers we choose often say more about our values and anxieties than about actual wealth or achievement.
Today’s luxury purchases may seem more sensible than renting pineapples or hiring hermits, but future generations might find our status symbols equally bizarre.
The drive to show off never changes, just the methods we use to do it.
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