What the Luxury Label Actually Buys
A field experiment said the logo brought social benefits. A double-blind replication found nothing across five experiments, and a cost in poorer neighbourhoods. Veblen, read properly, predicted the dependency.
Key takeaways
- Veblen put conspicuous leisure before conspicuous consumption, and the order is the argument: showing you need not work is the older signal, and visible buying overtakes it only among strangers.
- Nelissen and Meijers reported in 2011 that luxury brand labels brought social benefits to the wearer, and the paper became the standard citation.
- Joël Berger rebuilt that design double-blind in 2017 and found no positive luxury-label effect in any of five experiments, and no green-label effect.
- In poorer neighbourhoods a negative tendency of the luxury label became evident, meaning the logo appeared to cost the wearer.
- Bellezza, Gino and Keinan found visible nonconformity can raise inferred status, which means whatever observers read off clothing is not simply price.
The logo on your chest is doing less work than you think, and for a reason nobody selling it to you would put on a poster: it depends entirely on who is looking.
Thorstein Veblen
The idea is 1899, and the popular version of it has dropped the more interesting half.
The Theory of the Leisure Class has conspicuous leisure in chapter three and conspicuous consumption in chapter four, and the order is the argument rather than an accident of drafting. Demonstrating that you do not have to work is the older and originally stronger signal. Buying visibly overtakes it only as populations become urban, mobile and anonymous, because a stranger cannot see how you spend your Tuesday but can see what you are wearing.
That is the mechanism worth carrying, and it is not the one the phrase now carries. Modern usage treats conspicuous consumption as rich people showing off. Veblen's subject is a whole society's standards of decency, set at the top and travelling all the way down, and he says flatly in chapter four that no class, not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all customary conspicuous consumption. Our own note on this was wrong in that direction until somebody read the primary text and corrected it.
So the claim on the table is not that expensive things impress people. It is that a costly signal buys standing with strangers, precisely because it is costly.
Rob Nelissen
Evolutionary psychology gave that a testable shape, under the name costly signalling. If a label is expensive enough that only some people can afford it, wearing it is hard to fake, and an observer can use it as a shortcut to status and wealth. The prediction is concrete: people wearing the label should get better treatment in ordinary social encounters.
Rob Nelissen and Marijn Meijers put it in the field, publishing in Evolution and Human Behavior in 2011 under the title "Social benefits of luxury brands as costly signals of wealth and status". They reported positive evidence across seven experiments. It is the standard reference whenever anyone explains why the logo works.
Silvia Bellezza
A complication arrived before the correction did, and it is worth having in mind because it runs the other way.
Silvia Bellezza, Francesca Gino and Anat Keinan published "The Red Sneakers Effect" in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2014, on inferring status and competence from signals of nonconformity. The title states the finding. Under some conditions, visibly breaking a dress code raises what observers infer about your standing rather than lowering it. Richard Shotton builds a chapter of The Illusion of Choice on it, and our reliability audit of that book found its per-chapter reference lists to be the best apparatus of any consumer book on this shelf.
Hold the two together and the picture is already less tidy than the poster version. Conforming expensively raises your standing. Conspicuously not conforming also raises your standing. Whatever is being read off a person's clothes, it is not simply price.
Joël Berger
Then the replication, and this is the part of the story that has not travelled.
Joël Berger noticed a specific flaw in the original: some of its experiments were not run in a perfectly double-blind manner, meaning the people delivering the treatment could know which condition they were in. He rebuilt the design double-blind, added a "green" label condition to test whether signalling also explains environmental behaviour, and ran it in both average and below-average socioeconomic neighbourhoods, where costly-signalling theory predicts the luxury effect should be stronger still.
Five experiments, against the original's seven, which is an asymmetry worth stating rather than leaving for a reader to notice. In none of the five did he find a positive effect of the luxury brand label. No green-signalling effect either. And in poor neighbourhoods a negative tendency of the luxury label became evident, meaning the logo appeared to cost the wearer rather than pay them.
That was published in PLOS ONE in 2017 and is freely readable by anybody. The 2011 paper continues to be cited as established.
His own conclusion is the useful one, and it is not that signalling is nonsense. It is that any signalling account has to take the characteristics of the observer into account, including their own social status. The signal is not a property of the object. It is a transaction between two people, one of whom has to want to be impressed.
The rule we would take from it
Blinding is not a technicality, and it is the difference worth naming first. Being careful about it, though: Berger changed more than one thing at once. He ran the design double-blind, he added a green-label condition, and he ran in average and below-average socioeconomic neighbourhoods, in a different population from the original. So the honest statement is that the 2011 result did not survive a better-controlled attempt, not that blinding alone killed it. Isolating one of three changes as the cause would be us doing what we are criticising.
And for the practical end of it: if you are buying something partly to be seen with it, the question is not whether it looks expensive. On the best-controlled evidence available the label did not pay anywhere, in five experiments across two kinds of neighbourhood, and in the poorer ones there was a sign it cost the wearer. That is a weaker and stranger conclusion than the one the earlier paper supports, and it is the one with better controls behind it. Veblen's own account, read properly, said as much: the signal needs an audience that reads it, and he spent two chapters on what happens when the audience changes.
Sources
Veblen, T. (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class. Chs. 3 and 4. Read from the primary text in this vault, 2026-09-20, which corrected this vault's own note: the claim concerns a whole society's standards of decency set at the top and travelling down, and Veblen states in ch. 4 that no class, not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all customary conspicuous consumption.
Nelissen, R. M. A., & Meijers, M. H. C. (2011). 'Social benefits of luxury brands as costly signals of wealth and status.' Evolution and Human Behavior, 32(5), 343-355. Reported positive evidence for social benefits of luxury labels in field settings. Verified at the published record 2026-10-01. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.12.002
Berger, J. (2017). 'Are luxury brand labels and “green” labels costly signals of social status? An extended replication.' PLOS ONE, 12(2), e0170216. States that some experiments in the previous study were not conducted in a perfectly double-blind manner, and resolves this by replicating variations of the original design double-blind, adding a green-label condition, and running in both average and below-average socioeconomic neighbourhoods. Found no positive effects of the luxury brand label in any of five experiments, no green-signalling effect, and a negative tendency of the luxury label in poor neighbourhoods; concludes a signalling account must take the characteristics of observers into account. Verified at the published record 2026-10-01. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0170216
Bellezza, S., Gino, F., & Keinan, A. (2014). 'The red sneakers effect: inferring status and competence from signals of nonconformity.' Journal of Consumer Research, 41(1), 35-54. Verified at Crossref 2026-10-01, issued online 18 December 2013 in the 2014 volume. doi:10.1086/674870
Shotton, R. (2023). The Illusion of Choice. Harriman House. The red sneakers chapter. Read in full in this vault, 2026-09-21, with a reliability audit.