by Tanisha Pandey
Have you ever scrolled through TikTok and found yourself watching a video about “quiet luxury” that describes trends around pastel coats, monochromatic office wear and logo-free handbags. Do these videos provide you with information on who this style is meant for, or that they seem familiar somehow? Around 2022 “quiet luxury” emerged as a dominant fashion trend on social media framed in direct contrast to the loud, logo-heavy luxury aesthetics of the early 2000s. At the height of the trend, some creators famously drew inspiration from Gwyneth Paltrow’s courtroom outfits that she wore during her widely publicized trial, presenting her restrained, monochrome looks as symbolic of (understated) wealth and control. While these videos explicitly talk about fashion, what lies at the core is the creation of a certain persona, i.e., a certain archetype of a person who, while not being real, is still identifiable for the viewer. The persona triggered in this case is of values associated with old money, taste, composure, and affluence.
This blog post uses the phenomenon of “quiet luxury” to shed light on a popular discipline of sociolinguistics, namely social semiotics. This field examines how meaning is created, circulated, and stabilized across both language and other communicative modes. While sociolinguistics is typically understood as the study of language in its social context, social semiotics conceives language more broadly. It includes not only spoken and written forms, but also visual communication, such as clothing, design, spatial arrangements, and stylistics more generally.
The sociolinguistics of visual communication focuses on how graphic and aesthetic choices intersect with social categories such as class, gender, race, age, and place. Fashion trends like “quiet luxury” invite inquiries into what kinds of people are imagined through certain visual stylistic choices. In doing this, scholars reflect on critical questions such as:
- Does “quiet luxury” simply index wealth, or does it distinguish between different forms of wealth, such as royalty versus tech billionaires, old money versus new?
- Does it evoke particular gendered or racialized bodies?
- By studying the language of the fashion trend, researchers deliberate on how fashion evolves into an aesthetic to be emulated and locally reinterpreted.
An example of such work can be found in Jaworski and Thurlow’s 2017 study on media representations of the “super-rich.” They argue that constant coverage of excessive lifestyles normalizes extreme privilege while obscuring more ordinary forms of inequality. Media discourse oscillates between admiration and mockery, producing both desire and anxiety among audiences. Importantly, by distinguishing between the styles of the uber-rich and the supposed commoners, this process of semiotization also reassures viewers of their own decent taste and modesty. To go back to the example above, influencers and fashion vloggers who explain “quiet luxury” do more than just describe a trend; they also translate it for their viewers while simultaneously educating audiences on how to recognize, evaluate, and potentially acquire it. Herein lies the utility of contemporary platform-based practices such as ‘trend spotting,’ which, while technologically new, closely resemble older practices of learning what counts as good taste. In this way, visual design comes to rely on language (descriptions, labels, narratives) to become socially intelligible. Thurlow’s later work on place branding (2024) extends this argument beyond fashion. His analysis of how the Spanish town of Miajadas brands itself as the “Tomato Capital of Europe” shows how visual, material, and linguistic signs work together to position places within global economic hierarchies.
While these examples focus on how elitism is performed and consumed, sociolinguistics also examines how constructs of elitism can be imposed on groups to marginalize them. Angela Reyes’s 2017 analysis of “conyo” speech in the Philippines demonstrates how linguistic mixing (of indigenous and European languages) and excess are attributed to a particular subgroup that is consequently portrayed in a negative light. Through (parodied) reported speech, listeners construct “conyo” speakers as morally suspect while simultaneously establishing themselves as a more legitimate middle-class elite in contrast. Reyes shows that these distinctions between conyo and middle-class elites are not inherent but produced through semiotic processes tied to race, class, and postcolonial anxieties.
Ongoing research at the University of Bern’s Center for the Study of Language and Society builds on this. For instance, Tanisha Pandey’s MA thesis (2025) examines how elite speakers of Indian English in Delhi and Mumbai strategically vary their use and pronunciation of English and Hindi to navigate shifting ideas of nationhood and belonging. Her work highlights the use of overt linguistic variation as a resource for positioning oneself within changing socio-political dynamics. Contrastingly, Noëmi Kalbermatter’s MA research (2025) explores how language is used in discourses of children’s clothing and elite authenticity among Swiss mothers. Her research suggests that preferences even for second-hand items are constructed to function as symbols of “good motherhood” and aspiration. Taken together, these projects underscore the central claim of sociolinguistics and social semiotics: styles, whether linguistic or visual, have more than just aesthetic value. They are also powerful tools for producing meaning and may be used to reproduce inequality, though sometimes quietly and sometimes not at all.
References
Jaworski, A. & Thurlow, C. (2017). Mediatizing the “super rich”, normalizing privilege. Social Semiotics, 27(3), 276-287.
Kalbermatter, N. (2025). “I got gifted a hot pink terry cloth onesie. That wasn’t my taste at all”: Elite authenticity, distinction, and motherhood in discourses of children's clothing. M.A. Thesis, University of Bern.
Pandey, T. (2025). Contested Indianness: Aunty Talk, elite speech, and the dialogic construction of the Indian Other. M.A. Thesis, University of Bern.
Reyes, A. (2017). Inventing Postcolonial Elites: Race, Language, Mix, Excess. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 27(2), 210–231. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12156
Thurlow, C. (2024). Staging a tomatoscape: A case study in place branding and/as semiotic reflexivity. Linguistic Landscape, 10(1): 1–21.
