Table of Contents
- The Great Gatsby: an example of insecurity
- Loud luxury is about extravagance and opulence
- The Dubai chocolate syndrome
- Understated elegance
- Old money vs new money: what’s the difference?
The Great Gatsby: an example of insecurity
The sociocultural oppositions of quiet vs. loud luxury and exclusivity vs. insecurity are not new. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925, at the height of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.
Jay Gatsby’s journey through the novel exemplifies how his new money is not enough to gain the recognition of the established business class represented by Tom Buchanan and his wife, Daisy.
The loud parties he throws weekly suggest an underlying lack of belief in his worth and dignity as a human being.
Loud luxury is about extravagant opulence
Fast forward a century, and we see the contemporary Jay Gatsby occupying an unnecessarily expensive couch in a preposterously large and extravagantly decorated living room, staring at a gigantic TV screen.
He was one of the 330,514 tourists who visited Grand Cayman between January and September 2024 and took his Daisies to Seven Mile Beach on exorbitantly expensive dates.
Jay Gatsby of today did all of this not because he was genuinely fond of the Caribbean, but because he read somewhere that the island was the hottest tourist destination and wanted to Instagram himself from there.
he Dubai chocolate syndrome
AF&Co and Carbonate’s annual report on the hospitality trends for 2025 reveals that Dubai Chocolate accounts for four out of five pistachio searches on Google Trends.
The pistachio cream-filled chocolate bar’s growing popularity is due to Dubai-based food influencer Maria Vehera, who first reviewed it on TikTok in December 2023.
The Dubai chocolate syndrome shows how millions, if not hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide, could be lured into buying an overpriced dessert on impulse.
A destination for the insecure
Dubai’s Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DTCM) reports 9.31 million international visits in January-June 2024, but the emirate has long lost its reputation as a premium tourist destination.
Dubai has now come to symbolize loud luxury: a magnet for the newly rich, who take selfies on the top of Burj Khalifa to acquire much-needed reassurance of their social status.
Understated elegance
If you met a truly wealthy person, you would likely not recognize them, and for good reason. These individuals keep a low public profile, projecting a style of nonchalant elegance. Their exclusive social status reveals itself to a handful of fashion connoisseurs, who can ineffably tell a $165 De Coeur T-shirt from a $16 Walmart one.
The top one percent do not follow fashion; they make it. These individuals do not need to make a statement with their outfits. Instead, they invest in simple and not too revealing attires that effortlessly combine with various accessories.
Old money vs new money: what’s the difference?
Old money, also known as quiet luxury, is a social denomination for families who’ve owned large estates for generations and have been accumulating wealth for centuries rather than years.
Europe’s royal families are a final example of quiet luxury. There are ten royal houses in Europe, and their current heads’ combined net worth as of 2025 is $9.5 billion.
That’s nothing compared to Elon Musk’s net worth of $416.1 billion, one would say. Figures show that Europe’s ten ruling monarchs are about 44 times less wealthy than the richest man in the world.
However, if we consider the castles, mansions, and millions of acres of land these families have owned for generations and the connections they’ve built, the scales slowly begin to tip in their favor.
Whoever that individual may be, the wealthiest man in the world’s loud luxury could be transient and insecure, while the world monarchs’ quiet exclusivity is fixed.
