Everything Became a Signal

There is a tin of fish in my refrigerator I bought because the can was beautiful. The label is olive-printed, the type small, the brand one I had not heard of. I learned later it had been mentioned in a newsletter I do not subscribe to and reviewed in a publication I read sometimes. I paid twelve dollars for it. I have not opened it.

This is the part I keep noticing.

The decision to buy was, in some way, mine. I liked the print. I liked the heft of it in my hand. But the can also belonged to a category of objects I had begun to recognize without ever being introduced to the category — a quiet, cream-colored, lower-case-typeset aesthetic of small foods, small candles, small magazines, small home goods that has entered a shared domestic vocabulary among people roughly my age and roughly my orientation. To buy the can was to participate in something already in motion.

I bought a can of fish. I also bought a position.

Highsnobiety’s 2026 Status Economy report names what I was doing. They call it “Fast Moving Cultural Goods” — the migration of status out of fashion and into the categories that used to be infrastructure. Groceries. Beauty. Wellness. Travel. 71% of their audience say food and drink are “a new form of cultural capital.” 86% would rather show up to dinner being friends with the chef than wearing the latest luxury item. The fridge has become legible.

Status used to live in places that were obvious. A bag. A car. A watch. The label visible at a distance, designed to be visible at a distance. The brand told the story.

It does not work that way anymore. Not because logos disappeared, but because the surface of what counts as taste has migrated. The thing that reads now is the thing that signals you know what’s good without needing to broadcast it. The salt you cook with. The magazine on your table. The newsletter open in your tab. The flowers you happen to have, wrapped in butcher paper from the place you happen to know.

Cultural fluency has replaced the logo.

I notice this in myself — and this is the part that troubles me — most acutely when I am hosting. Which book is on the side table. Which way the candle is turned so the brand name does not show. Which bottle gets put away, which one is left out. None of these decisions are accidental. None of them are particularly conscious, either. They are happening at the level below taste, in the place where taste hardens into habit. I am performing — for whom, I am not always sure.

Highsnobiety puts it more bluntly than I would: 62% of their audience say a person’s pantry tells them how “culturally clued in” the person is. Ranking your friends by what is in their fridge sounds like a joke. It is not a joke. It is a research finding.

The most useful line in the report is the one most easily missed. The Status Economy, Highsnobiety writes, “has not flattened or democratized status. Status remains exclusionary by nature. What has changed is where and how it is demonstrated.” It moved categories. It did not move power.

There is something I admire in the shift from logo to fluency. Status that requires literacy is, in some ways, more honest than status that requires money.

But the literacy is not equally distributed. The signals are not legible to people outside the room. To read the salt on the table you have to already know the salt. The economy of taste rewards the fluent and forgets everyone else.

The hierarchies have not flattened. They have just gone underground.

The tin of fish is still in my refrigerator. I have not eaten it. I have not posted about it. I have not yet decided whether keeping it unopened is the more honest position.