Sociology to Save Your Life: Cultural Capital

The cool clothing of power and privilege

Apr 19, 2024

“That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room…from a pile of ‘stuff.’” -Amanda Priestly

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” -Karl Marx

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”- Mark Twain

Skiers as white as the snow

I had one of my first proto-sociological wonderings around age 9 when I indelicately asked my brother why almost all skiers were white. He patiently explained that the reason involves the history of the sport and overwhelming expense of the gear, lift tickets, and lodging. While skiing is a hobby that in theory anyone can do, in practice it is inseparable from other forms of privilege. If you surveyed a bunch of people in the lift line at a ski resort, you would not get a representative sample of the US population, but would instead get a revealing data set about “people who ski.”

According to the National Ski Areas Association, 88% of skiers are indeed white. Yet pointing out that a fancy snow sport is dominated by privileged white people is not a groundbreaking claim. In fact, we may need to coin the term “ground-filling” for such fancifully obvious assertions before Malcolm Gladwell releases any more books.

However, before dismissing this as an intellectual cul-de-sac, consider golf. When French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu coined the term cultural capital, he wasn’t writing about golf, but if he was writing today I bet he would have mentioned it.

We live in a world where 90% of Fortune 500 CEOs play golf and 50% of female executives say that just being able to talk about golf helps them be more successful. This means that taking golf lessons from a young age is a sound investment in your future. Having a solid golf game means you’ll be invited to play more golf, ensuring you’ll be there when important relationships are made, deals are brokered, and alliances solidified. You can try to dismiss golf as just a silly Scottish game, but the reality is that it helps people get ahead in business, politics, and life. Golf is more than a hobby; it’s a type of cultural capital.

Golf nicely encapsulates the two main reasons that cultural capital is worth examining and understanding. The first is that it’s literally everywhere. Many of the behaviors we assume to be casual or personal choices like the clothes we wear, hobbies we engage in, and podcasts we quote are also key status signifiers in social settings. The second is that it reveals the ways in which the hierarchies and stratification of capitalism have metastasized into nearly every aspect of our lives. Since cultural capital constitutes much of adult life, understanding it is much more useful than merely discussing a concept. It’s about better grasping the nuanced contours of a game that, like it or not, we’re all playing constantly.

Bourdieu for me and you

Cultural capital is much bigger than which hobbies we choose. In his 1977 essay “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” an effort to explain the differing levels of academic achievement in French children in the 1960s, Bourdieu identifies 3 important types of cultural capital:

Embodied Cultural Capital is the knowledge, habits, and behaviors that we acquire through socialization. Examples include being proficient in a foreign language, being on top of food, fashion, or film trends, knowing enough about wine to banter with a sommelier (and hopefully order a great bottle) or grasping the etiquette needed to navigate unique spaces like board rooms or country clubs.
Objectified Cultural Capital is property like art, books, clothing or collectors items that help display our economic prowess and worldliness. Examples include owning designer clothing like a Burberry trench coat, a cool instrument like a Gibson Les Paul guitar, or, if you’re Jay Z, a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Institutionalized Cultural Capital is a more formal recognition of your knowledge and status via a credential or title. Examples include going to fancy school like Harvard or Stanford, having a sought-after title like CEO, or the prestigious alphabet soup of having MBA, MD, JD, or PhD on your resume.

Dressing the part

Fashion is one of the most accessible and fascinating forms of cultural capital. While clothing is on one level always functional, it’s also one of the most basic ways we tell the world about our identity every single day. The persistent notions that fashion is frivolous, just for women, or an optional part of modern life couldn’t be farther from the truth. As Anne Hathaway learned so quickly from Meryl Streep’s trenchant monologue in The Devil Wears Prada, believing that you’ve chosen to “opt-out” of the game of fashion is naive and ultimately impossible. More importantly, the reality is that you will be judged for how you dress regardless of if you personally care about it.

As a young man you’re often told that you ought to own a light blue Oxford shirt. This is because most men look good in light blue and Oxford shirts are seen as professional and academic, ideal for both first dates and job interviews. Owning a light blue Oxford is a sartorial shorthand for you being a smart, handsome, and competent man. Even if you are none of these things, putting on the shirt means people will give you the benefit of the doubt until you open your mouth and prove otherwise.

Wearing the right clothes for the occasion, whether that’s a friend’s wedding, a family funeral, or dinner at a fancy restaurant, is a way of proving that you know enough about self presentation to “look the part” of the role you’re supposed to play. Conversely, the experience of being underdressed at an important event is so mortifying because it’s a glaring reminder that you do not fit in with the group, which indicates a lack of knowledge, respect, and status on your part.

A nice shorthand for cultural capital is what rooms and spaces you feel like you like fit in. Being dressed appropriately, being able to participate in a shared hobby, and speaking articulately about a sports team, news story, or TV show are all ways of signaling that you belong and should be given the rewards that members of the in group receive.

However, like emotional labor, cultural capital gets tricky and interesting quickly because it never exists in a vacuum. It’s always interacting with other axes of our identities and power structures like race, gender, and class. Cultural capital straddles the world of social skills, games, and etiquette and the one of business transactions, investment, and wealth transfer, which makes it both useful and problematic.

Influencers, aspirational spending, and income inequality

Something Alexis was quite vocal about when we first started dating was how much it bothered her that our society basically worships world travel when it’s financially and logistically impossible for many people. “How convenient that all these skinny wealthy white women on Instagram always find themselves while under a waterfall in Thailand,” she’d remark. Her righteous indignation touches on a key dynamic of cultural capital: how it often functions as a camouflage for privilege.

A keen observer will note that many forms of cultural capital, like a regular golf schedule, international travel experiences, designer clothing, or a degree from a prestigious school are rarely free and are usually quite expensive. This makes cultural capital hard to separate from financial privilege. Moreover, the way in which it disguises wealth in a trendy outfit is increasingly the point.

In her book The Sum of Small Things USC Sociologist Elizabeth Currid Hackett articulates that cultural capital has become a way for a new class of elites, the aspirational class, to rebrand their wealth, repackaging conspicuous consumption as smaller lifestyle choices like buying organic food, going to yoga class, or wearing organic cotton t-shirts. While these things come without the stigma and attention associated with a fancy car or flashy jewelry, Hackett points out that they’re ironically often just as expensive and hard to access. Traveling to a yoga retreat in Bali is likely a four figure investment all said and done, but this price tag gets bathed in the glow of worldliness and wellness. With this lens, Tesla’s branding alchemy had nothing to due with lithium ion batteries and everything to do with how it effectively disguised affluence as environmentalism.

This isn’t just about fancy people hiding their wealth, however. Like actual capital, cultural capital is often unevenly distributed across society. As tempting as it is to try to dismiss cultural capital as superficial because of how immaterial it can seem, the reality is it’s often inseparable from the very real forms of power and wealth imbalances that it exacerbates over time. What we naively want to view as meritocracy, individual circumstances, or lucky breaks are often actually forms of cultural capital that have been carefully cultivated across an entire lifetime.

This starts from a very young age. The connections and social skills gained at exclusive summer camps, internships, private schools, or fraternities and sororities are often inaccessible to those outside the predominantly white elite. Left to their own devices, people will often subconsciously befriend, hire, and promote people that look, sound, and dress like them. A society where private school graduates gain admission to better colleges, consulting firms favor alumni from specific schools or fraternities, and major business deals unfold on the golf course is one in which cultural capital constantly shapes your life trajectory. While many rightfully object to the inequities this leads to, this critique is itself a recognition of the surprising power of cultural capital.

Is your network really your networth?

In the white collar professional landscape where networking is such an essential way to find high-paying jobs, cultural capital’s relevance shines brightest. Whether we flaunt it or not, it’s often cultural capital that forms the impression people get of us.

You can talk at length about The Huberman Lab, own a Patagonia vest, and graduated from Stanford?

You’ll have no trouble finding a job, a belay partner, and first dates in the Bay Area.

You are well-versed in A-24 films, own an Acne Studios coat, and can quote Jia Tolentino essays?

You’re destined to make friends and influence people in Brooklyn.

You can identify hundreds of bird species, own a Barbour jacket, and speak fluent Mandarin?

You’re my friend Matt. Thanks for reading and keep the bird facts coming.

And so on.

You’re often told to not peak in high school because stereotypically the coolest kids in your high school end up in dead end jobs and failed relationships later. I’d argue that cultural capital is how savvy individuals quietly convert the currency of social status into tangible success. It’s an endlessly fascinating game that appears to be coincidental and accessible to all, but often slyly obscures the challenges faced by those outside of its inner circles, cleverly disguising wealth and privilege as sophistication. Cultural capital's ubiquity and connection to power alter our lives profoundly, whether acknowledged or ignored. Exploring it reveals how individuals leverage personal connections and social appeal to ascend the social hierarchy, transforming something as ephemeral and amorphous as “coolness” into a potent and enduring form of power.

Pretty cool, right?

I want to hear your thoughts on cultural capital.

Wryly Reilly

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