class consciousness, but make it fashion
revisiting Leandra Medine's "Cutting Room Floor" interview
In 2021, Claire Lampen wrote a piece for The Cut, titled, “Upper East Sider Realizes She’s Privileged”. The Upper East Sider in question was Leandra Medine (of the now-defunct blog, Man Repeller). The article covered a podcast interview Medine had given to designer Recho Omondi for Omondi’s podcast, The Cutting Room Floor. Medine described her recent realization that, as a New Yorker who attended private school and whose family owned a second home in Southampton, she grew up privileged. As a teenager, she’d felt like she was poor because her classmates were much wealthier than her. Medine still occupied this “upper echelon”, but was “on the lower end”. She didn’t realize the breadth of her privilege because she only saw it in relation to her similarly fortunate peers. If anything her life seemed normal, even below average, to her.
Though there are other valid reasons to dislike Medine, she was universally mocked for believing she “was poor growing up, that I didn’t have anything.” Reading this piece uncomfortably reminded me of myself.
I admittedly did not grow up on the Upper East Side of New York. My family doesn’t own a second home. But I did attend a sprawling day camp as a kid and spent one summer at a sleepaway camp complete with horseback riding, water skiing, and a climbing wall. In high school, I moved to an affluent suburb. My parents gifted me a car. I received an allowance throughout college and graduated without any debt, by way of scholarships and a college savings account funded by my grandparents.
Regardless of my immense privilege, I often felt the gap between myself and my wealthier peers. At sleepaway camp, a friend jokingly asked if I was poor because I had brought a thin plush blanket rather than a comforter for my bunk bed setup. When I studied abroad in college, I traveled to different cities almost every weekend, racking up my credit card bill. On a final trip, I was running low on my checking account and had to ask my friend to cover a hotel night for me when I couldn’t immediately afford to send the hundred euros. I had this gnawing feeling of being a striver. But the fact that I dealt with these insecurities at a $5,000 sleepaway camp or could even travel to a new Italian city every weekend was proof of my affluence.
I should’ve realized that I was not an interloper. In the grand scheme of things (and even in the medium scheme of things), I counted myself among the “haves”. If I overdrew my checking account, my parents would replenish it. I was not at risk of starving or becoming unhoused. If I overspent, I risked my parents’ frustration, not our financial security.
Like Leandra Medine, I had lost my sense of perspective. Being surrounded by wealth distorted my brain. And though I could have simply said no to things I couldn’t afford (or felt uncomfortable spending money on), this desire to keep up with the Joneses and transcend my perceived social strata caused me to deflate my actual socioeconomic status.
Hopefully, you don’t resent me for comparing myself to Medine or revealing how thoroughly I won the privilege lottery. But I think this sense of striving and underestimating our own advantages is more common than we realize. It’s fun to pile onto an out-of-touch Upper East Sider like Medine, but I think there are elements of her thinking that echo in many of us, especially those who read that piece in The Cut.
Maybe it was so easy to denigrate Medine because we saw the worst parts of ourselves in her. Maybe we mocked her because we wanted to believe we were different when we were not.
In fact, Medine’s interpretation makes sense. As a teenager, she was exposed to the greatest excesses of wealth. And when wealth represents power, your comparative lack of it can feel overwhelming.
Just like we hyper-fixate on the negative rather than the positive, we also pay extra attention to what we don’t have, rather than what we do. When we see how much someone else can have, the gap between us and the next person might seem insurmountable. Those in this upper echelon can all afford a comfortable life. Despite this, we’ll always desire more. It’s impossible to feel satisfied when you can see how much more you can have, and how much further you need to go in order to achieve it.
This also feeds into the narrative that we’re the underdog. It is a comforting narrative, one that makes you look good and gives you a sort of self-righteousness because you’ve experienced some struggle. It wouldn’t mesh with our personal myth if we knew we were actually Goliath.
The media we consume can also cause us to underestimate our wealth. Those who hold the most power are often the ones writing films and TV shows, simply because they have the time, connections, and/or money to succeed. Casually glamorous lives are depicted as normal, or even below the norm. Characters regularly flaunt designer clothes and live in spacious apartments that make zero financial sense given their purported salary (unless you factor in family money). I know that these TV shows and movies are aspirational, idealized versions of reality. But they needle their way into our brains as being normal because they make up the majority of media.
Though it’s understandable to underestimate your own privilege, I don’t think we should simply grow complacent with that as truth. Believing that you are poor (when you are demonstrably not) or acknowledging your privilege without changing anything can both be harmful. By minimizing our wealth, are we becoming blissfully unaware of our role in others’ subjugation? Or how far removed we are from the actual working class? In both cases, we mistake acknowledgment for action and believe that experiencing inconsequential money struggles is the same as class solidarity.
In Haley Nahman’s essay, “Do we ‘live in hell’?”, she explores a similar tendency with young people who say that we “live in hell”. Nahman writes:
“For the luckiest among us, to suffer today’s “hellscape” is mostly to be aware of others’ suffering: to read an onslaught of bad or stupid news. Then, to have no ability to change it, or to sense your own complacency in the system that created it. For the less lucky, however, nothing is solved by logging off (if they’re logging on at all). I think that distinction matters more than most rage-posters are willing to acknowledge. Who, exactly, is in hell?”
There’s a parallel between this and the money woes of the upper class. Especially for those who are well-off and acknowledge it (i.e., myself), there’s a level of awareness. We care about socioeconomic inequalities enough to recognize them, but not enough to do something about it. To redistribute our own wealth (in big or small ways) would disrupt the comfortable life that it has afforded us thus far. Once you reach a certain level, money begins to have diminishing returns. However, we seem to value those margins more than we value the livelihoods and outcomes of those below us. We see this when it comes to workers’ unions. We might complain about the unions, especially during strikes, because things will cost slightly more and take slightly longer to get to us. We feel inconvenienced when someone’s attempt to earn a living interrupts our normal flow of life. We’re all for workers’ rights until the fight ends up in our backyard.
We often prioritize our pursuit of gaining ever more wealth (to keep up with those Joneses!) over the shared success and leveling out of the classes. Acknowledging your privilege and the problem of inequality is not enough to even the scales. It often feels like virtue signaling, a way to position yourself on the “right” side of history. You’re in the 1%, but the good part. To have strong morals means to change your life to fit those morals, even if it’s slightly uncomfortable or unfamiliar. To be insecure about money within an otherwise cushy life does not mean that you are insolvent or incapable when it comes to helping the more vulnerable.
It’s been a while since I posted! I’ll admit that I started and stopped about a half dozen essays before finishing this one. Writing is all in the rewrite and all that. Anyway, sorry for the delay. Here’s a couple of things I’ve been into recently:
The podcast “Normal Gossip”, particularly this episode. Each episode is about a single gossip story from the real world (be it juicy, banal, and/or perplexing). I didn’t realize how entertaining a stranger’s gossip could be until I started listening to this show.
The YouTube channel Horses. It has insanely great video essays on history and modern culture. The editing is stunning and I’m endlessly confused why it doesn’t have more subscribers. If you’d like a sampler, start out with this (very relevant) video on why rich people love pretending to be poor.
This very good video essay from Sarah Z about queerbaiting. She challenges the pseudo-liberal criticisms lodged at people who experiment with sexuality and/or gender.
Another video essay! This one’s from Elliot Sang and it explores the loss of third places, isolation, and technology. If you’ve ever been cautioned against spending too much time on your phone/computer, this video is for you.
This LA Times article covering Billy Porter’s response to the Harry Styles Vogue cover.
That’s all for now! I’ll be back (hopefully sooner than this time!) with another essay in the next week or so.
xoxo, Mia