Exploitation of The Poor Aesthetic: Proletariat Turned Chic

Abstract: Poverty as a culture is being exploited by the bourgeoisie. The ‘new age hippie’, or trustafarian, is a relatively new idea in the cultural sense, the original hippie movement only being about 40 years old. The rich exploit the aesthetic of the poor by framing it in a romanticized way, one of them being volunteer trips to third world countries. Celebrities and politicians try to connect with the general public by setting up a stage in which they perform feigned poverty, which leads to unrealistic media representation of the poor. Due to the lack of accurate representation between proletarian and bourgeoisie, the two groups have culturally collided and then combined, making poverty and wealth hard to detect, other than by recognizing stereotypes.

Key words: Trustafarian, Poverty, Cultural Appopriation, Aesthetics, Culture, TikTok, Hippies, Pop Culture, Celebrities, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Volunteer, Consumerism, Stereotypes

Review of Literature: According to Asteriti (2014), citing the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the image of the underclass has been violated by capitalism. According to Enebi (2016), slum tourism has harmed Africa in several ways, ending in violation of dignity.

 

Picture perfect poverty, unlike the life of actual proletarians, is meant to be aesthetically pleasing. Children share hand-me-downs with their siblings whom they love, mothers bake cakes on special occasions at which the children will look back fondly at throughout their whole lives, and hard-working fathers come home to hug their children with grime and sweat on their shirts. They are not uneducated, dirty, menacing or depressed. Celebrities tell success stories about their lives that they built with their bare hands, or if that is not the case, choose to keep their childhood a mystery. Photographs of malnourished African children with bloated abdomens and flies on their faces sell fair trade chocolate. Traditional manual labour is an embarrassing profession. “But aren’t the workers perhaps beautiful (Standen 2015, 79)?” This essay will view poverty as a culture and how it is being exploited by the rich.

A trustafarian is a derogatory term used to describe a young person from a wealthy background whose trust fund enables him or her to eschew conventional attitudes to work, dress, drug taking, etc (Dictionary.com 2024). It is a combination of the words Trust fund baby and Rastafarian. This is the new age hippie, where a white person with a monetary safety net goes on spirituality tours to Africa and South America to do volunteer work or find their true selves. An example of a trustafarian is TikTok influencer and singer Shanin Blake, a millionaire blonde white woman with dreads who takes drugs and sings about alien conspiracy theories while living in a mansion. Though Shanin has responded to the allegations of her being a trust fund baby by posting about her life struggles after being cut off from her family, it does not change the fact that she is the embodiment of cultural appropriation in the rich white hippie community, hence she will be used as an example nonetheless. Just believing in spirituality, peace and love is not the most prevalent hippie value. In the 60s and 70s, hippies were seen as revolutionaries, associated with the counterculture movement and anti-materialistic values. What has changed, so that the idea of hippies or hipsters is not associated with anti-consumerism but rather rich white people paying extra for soy milk in their coffee and applying beard oil?

Poverty has become less and less visible, and the bourgeoisie as well. Oftentimes both the rich and the relatively poor attend the same public schools, the same colleges, and sometimes even the same first part-time jobs. The difference is that one pair of worn sneakers were bought three years ago from Walmart, and the other are brand new from Balenciaga, purposefully pre-worn down. Working class young people pretend to be bourgeois students, adopting the tastes and fashions and pretentions of the bourgeoisie (Asteriti 2014, 3). But the bourgeois aesthetic is impossible to attain for the lower class, and they are switching places. Vintage polo shirts are easily attainable nowadays and relatively cheap, whereas Rick Owens shoes look like off-brand Converse sneakers. Being rich has become discreet. But a stereotype is easy to spot, one of the stereotypes being hipsters.

It costs more to be healthy, eco-friendly and high. It costs almost twice as much money to buy a single serving of salad than to buy a hamburger set from a fast-food restaurant. When someone can afford to make a choice in how they like their coffee and chia bagel sandwich, it is automatically an indication of pretentiousness. When someone has the ability to buy drugs and administer them in a safe location on a workday and preach about how free it makes them feel, that is a privilege. The people who say that there are more important things in life than money are from rich households. They romanticize how intimate and down-to-earth being poor is.

In 2019, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West posted a picture of them eating breakfast in a middle-class kitchen in sweatsuits. The picture is taken by someone else who is out of the frame while Kim and Kanye sit, looking casual while the photo is obviously shot with the flash on to give a grainy, nostalgic look. The photo feels like a production, something that has been staged. Even if the billionaires had not intended to look middle class, the photo certainly has its own intonations. Because the rich are seen as unapproachable to the public, politicians and celebrities often attempt to create a connection with the middle to lower class audience. They want to be viewed as “one of them”, “them” being the poor, to be seen as modest human beings. But being actually poor is not about modesty. It is reality.

Education, especially high-quality education, is still reserved for the privileged. Students can pay to get into Harvard. Most prestigious universities require students to do volunteer work, even better if it took place overseas. According to Project Volunteer Nepal, volunteers often romanticize local poverty because they feel that poverty symbolizes a non-commercialized, natural and beautiful world (Project Volunteer Nepal 2017). Citizens of third world countries appear “poor-but-happy”, detached from materialism, and overall appear pure to rich student volunteers. This is because they feel uncomfortable facing extreme poverty, and because of the need to overcome that inner conflict and shock, they come up with a negotiating strategy to view the poor as happy, minimalistic and authentic. This is the truth behind the gap year student’s newly found self, the doctrine that new age hippies preach about being grateful and free from materialistic values. The bourgeois students, now equipped with a twisted worldview, enter an echo chamber where the professors and other students only act as a reflection of their own shallowness.

The problem is not in the plane tickets, or the volunteer work package tour, or even the need to rationalize the shock from witnessing true poverty, but rather the ignorance that the rich possess. The misconception that the first world poor cannot possibly be poor because they own cell phones and live under a roof and the third world “poor-but-happy” individuals do not feed the ever-growing gap between social classes. Being unable to afford a car in which to drive to work, having to take out a loan to attend college or to buy a house, or being unable to pay for an unexpected medical bill is what being poor is in first world countries, and it is no less devastating. Even conventional middle-class citizens fit the criteria of modern poor. The modern poor need to prove their innocence, their poverty, because it is not openly evident yet crushing, while the rich complain about how a miniscule portion of their taxes are used to feed the “incompetent members of society”.

The myth of exotic poverty has led to horribly inaccurate media representation of being poor. The penniless main character of a movie is characterized by a messy three-room apartment in New York with piles of laundry and empty pizza boxes littering the spacious living room. They spend all their money that they have earned from their part time job on alcohol and drugs, and they are beautiful and skinny with their messy makeup and rugged leather jackets. They are criminals, prostitutes, or ex-government agents with a sad backstory. They eat cold leftovers straight from the fridge, they are disheveled but also mysterious and almost hot. Then, there is the polar opposite of hot poverty: slummy poverty. In 2013, Rick Ross shot a music video in Lagos, intentionally featuring some of the roughest parts of the city (Enebi 2016). It is the grand stereotype of African city come to life, heavily focusing on the negative imagery while Lagos and Africa itself has been fighting the wrongful perception for years. Viewing poverty as a culture, keeping in mind that being rich is also a culture, means this blunt misrepresentation is a form of cultural appropriation.

Because the two classes-the working class and the bourgeoisie-cannot be mixed, the only vantage point is media, whether it be social media or literature or cinema. In response, the privileged recognize being poor as eating cheap food or riding public transportation. South Korean politicians often try to gain citizens’ support by eating commonfolk food from outdoor marketplace vendors or riding the bus to work, while being surrounded by reporters and camera flashes. They shake hands with the usually-untouchable senior citizens gathering cardboard boxes to sell for mere pennies. The poor get shunned for trying to appear rich, buying imitation bags, while the rich and powerful get a pat on the back for acknowledging that the poor exist on the same planet as them.

In conclusion, the image of poverty, which is made up in itself, is inappropriately exploited by the bourgeoisie who do not understand the concept of being poor. The new age hippies are painfully unaware of how dystopian their existence is, and the modern poor are almost invisible and easily ignored. Consumerism is at its peak, where products for both the poor trying to appear rich and the rich yearning for the poverty chic look are flooding the market. This is capitalism at its worst, where the lack of capital has been monetized. 

 

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