Random Most Ridiculous And Over-The-Top Status Symbols Throughout History (14 items)

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  (#1) British Nobles Built Elaborate Fake Castle Ruins Complete With Fake Hermits

  In the 18th and 19th centuries in the United Kingdom, building a "folly" was all the rage for the rich and famous. What’s a folly? It’s a massive structure - think giant, ivy-covered castle ruins - built entirely for non-serious purposes like entertaining rich guests. Party-goers at the homes of nobility had the opportunity to tour and play in the follies, and most follies had their own “legends” attached. Some follies even had “hermits” living in them who were paid to jump out and scare guests with their gnarly, wizened visages.

  Other than the exorbitant expense of building and maintaining a folly (which is what made it a status symbol), the whole concept doesn’t sound so different from the living history demonstrations and cosplay people love to participate in today.
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  (#7) Pineapples Were The Caviar And Cristal Of The 18th Century

  Do you ever look at the pineapple in your fruit salad, lean back, and muse on the empowering feeling of your high status as represented by your lunch? Probably not, since it’s not the eighteenth century. However, back then, owning a pineapple was pretty much the peak of luxurious living. You see, pineapples are native to South America and were unknown to Europeans before Columbus’s foray into the “New” World. When Columbus returned with pineapples in his cargo, aristocratic Europeans fell in LOVE, but they didn’t yet know how to cultivate the strange fruit. As a result, a single pineapple was worth the equivalent of around $8,000 in contemporary money, and party hosts would even rent a pineapple for a single night to have on display in order to dazzle their guests.
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  (#6) Being Overweight Meant You Could Afford Rich Food And A Life of Leisure

  It may be surprising to learn that the expression “fat cat" (which is now used to refer to moneyed, slimy-but-powerful members of the elite) has somewhat literal origins. Weight, especially possessing lots of it, stood for a long time as a symbol of status and prosperity.  If you could afford to be overweight, you obviously had enough money to buy sumptuous food, and you had the ability to avoid manual labor.

  Weight as a status symbol basically clung on until the early twentieth century when, for the first time in the West, plentiful food supplies become relatively abundant even for the lowest members of the social hierarchy. Today, when cooking healthful food and going to the gym requires more leisure time and money, thinness has become a status symbol instead.
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  (#12) Pure White Cuffs And Collars Meant You Could Afford To Stay Clean

  One way to prove your superiority in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was by paying careful attention to keeping your whitest whites FLAWLESS. Clean clothes signified a clean mind and body, while also indicating a person’s status. So, in order to prove his inner and outer cleanliness, a wealthy Tudor would rock a pristine white collar and white cuff. This is why portraits of rich families from that time period almost always show men with visible white cuffs and collars.
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  (#14) In The US Today, Being Too Busy To Sleep Means Your Time Must Be Pretty Valuable

  In the United States, those who want to show off their high status go back and forth between doing so through a lack of sleep or an overabundance of it. Sometimes, busyness, as shown through harried, blood-shot eyes, is the way to demonstrate your worth and importance. Other times, it’s through your ability to attain a restful night’s sleep. According to Nancy Jeffrey, a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal, in 1999, sleep had become such a “rare commodity in stressed-out America” that it was “the new status symbol.” Let’s bring that back!
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  (#3) Chinese Women Had Their Feet Crippled As A Status Symbol

  For nearly ten centuries, if you were a woman who wanted to marry into money in China, then you submitted to the unbelievably painful practice of foot binding. Foot binding - which left its practitioners with so-called “lotus feet” - involved breaking the toes and bones of the arch and binding them tightly together from the time a girl was around 7 years old until adulthood. Lotus feet, which are about three inches long, signified both beauty and status. The thinking behind the symbols goes, if you can submit to a process that will render you unable to really walk or work, you must come from a family wealthy enough for your labor not to matter. The practice actually had to be nationally outlawed in 1912 in order to get people to stop doing it.

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