Friendly reminder that the Barber Pole Model of Fashion is utterly wrong. It makes sense, and I can understand why people might imagine that fashion works this way. However clothing is expensive and the lower classes can’t actually emulate the upper classes.
(Quick poll: do you own $800 shoes? Because that’s how a lower bound on how expensive your shoes need to be to pass as upper class).
Actually this is kind of a black mark on the community’s epistemic record. AFAICT everyone just assumed the model was correct and never bothered to check that fashion actually works that way?
Non-price elements of fashion can be emulated by lower classes. Knockoff handbags that have all the properties of expensive designer handbags except price and being made by a particular company are a thing. More abstractly, cuts, colors, degrees of ornateness, things like a tendency to carry a purse vs. a backpack, etc. can all be emulated. Remember that the goal isn’t to pass My Fair Lady-style, but to look slightly more sophisticated to the members of your actual class.
OP, nobody thinks the barber pole model means that working-class people wear $800 designer shoes; as @another-normal-anomaly said, it’s about “looks”, styles, etc (in particular any factors that don’t depend on expensive materials or trademarked brand names); not about exact passing.
You don’t have to use individual products as your unit of analysis, and in fact in this case you shouldn’t, because doing so would lead to extremely stupid conclusions, as you note. The black mark is on the one who would jump to condemning the whole community without first considering whether maybe the thing people believe isn’t actually the single most slavishly literal interpretation of the model.
Examples that I can think of of things following the barber pole model:
The upper classes wore silk stockings. People invented nylon stockings for the lower classes to wear that looked similar. Stockings fell out of fashion.
The upper classes had bags with designer logos. The lower classes realized that you can make knockoff bags with designer logos. Logos fell out of fashion among the upper classes and came to be seen as tacky. According to this article they are now trendy again, idk.
(I am not a fashion historian and don’t know if these stories are exactly accurate, but I’m pretty sure just the existence of nylon stockings/knockoff bags shows that it is possible for lower classes to emulate upper-class fashion? As long as not everyone can tell the difference between cheap and expensive clothes with perfect accuracy this still works.)