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The flip side was that if you do have an item not available to everyone else, that was an honest signal of great connections, and connections were the real currency.
Back in USSR, in the eighties, I have known a fashionable young woman who had a Revlon lipstick case. The actual lipstick was long gone, but Margarita "refilled" it by buying whatever lipstick she could get (she bought as many as she could of the same color) and transferring the stick into the Revlon plastic case and then shaping the end of the stick to look more like the original Revlon version. When preparing to go out, she would use the other tube; the Revlon case she kept in her purse together with the powder compact. In public, included the girls-go-to-the-bathroom-together, Margarita would pull out the compact and the Revlon and gently touch up her lips.
(The publicly overt makeup touch-up was pretty common; it's a way of signalling I-act-a-lady-so-treat-me-like-one. Not merely performance of femininity, to use the modern parlance, but also performance of class, even in a supposedly classless society.)
The USSR did not allow imports of Revlon cosmetics (or other Western brands) for general sale. Having a Revlon lipstick case meant that Margarita knew someone who knew someone who could get stuff. In the soviet economy where shortages were the norm and officially unacknowledged, that connection represented a resource far more useful than a stack of cash. Someone who can get a Revlon lipstick case is also someone who may know where to get, e.g., some beef liver for your anemic kid, or insulin for your diabetic father when the apothecaries ran out. Yes, Margarita was a very useful person to have in your network.
Back to the US present, I notice similar signals among some women who clearly don't have much income but who wear designer clothes and carry brand handbags. Like, someone who has two jobs working as a caterer and a cashier, yet has an Yves Saint Laurent handbag and wears Agolde jeans. I used to think: wow, that woman has some serious credit card debt. But now I consider the possibility that it could be a signal of resourcefulness. Like, she knows where and when some serious sales happen, or where to get barely-used brand stuff at steep discount. Unfortunately (for such a woman), the credit card debt is the more likely explanation, precisely because just about anyone can get a credit card and then buy that brand handbag and jeans.
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