The people a previous generation might have called public intellectuals also make much of their living by leveraging the Rosen effects of mass popularity and the Marshall effect of earning lavish fees from a plutocracy that can afford to pay them. Malcolm Gladwell, the world’s most influential business writer, is an example. He is paid millions to write books. But he makes almost as much—and with less effort—by giving $100,000 speeches. Groups he has addressed include a gathering of Blackstone’s investors and the Pebble Beach legal conference, the Davos of the world’s top lawyers.
You don’t have to top the bestseller list to profit from the super-elite speaking circuit. Charlie Cook, the political analyst and editor of the twenty-eight-year-old
This interplay of Marshall effects—in-person performances for a society growing more affluent—and Rosen effects—the power of technology-driven scale—is creating a superstar effect beyond what we are accustomed to thinking of as the performing arts.
Consider chefs. The rise of culinary superstars is certainly an example of Alfred Marshall’s trickle-down wealth from the super-rich. Plutocrats not only insist on the best barristers and the finest jockeys, they also want to dine at El Bulli, with its €250 prix fixe meal (or at whatever its successor turns out to be). And there, you might think, it would end. After all, preparing a delicious meal, like arguing a case in court or riding a racehorse, is a hands-on service, which can’t be duplicated and scaled in the way an aria or a drama can be.
For superstars, that is a serious financial constraint. One way celebrity chefs are getting around it is by transforming their trade from a high-end personal service to a scalable mass performance. Thus Mario Batali first shot to fame as the iconoclastic founder of Po, a trattoria in New York’s West Village. But, even at fifteen dollars a plate, physical dishes of ravioli can get you only so far. Batali became a real superstar in 1997, when he signed a contract to host his own show,
You could observe how superstar chefs benefit from both the Rosen and Marshall effects at a super-elite meal hosted by consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton on a balmy late June evening in 2011 at the Aspen Meadows Resort during the Aspen Ideas Festival, where this evening’s guests included, among others, Alan Greenspan. “Curated” food has become part of the super-elite lifestyle, so for this “meal of a lifetime” the consulting firm flew in Craig Stoll, co-owner and cofounder of the Delfina group of restaurants in San Francisco, so he and his kitchen staff could prepare supper. Each course was “narrated” by Corby Kummer, a senior editor and food writer at the
There was a lot to narrate. The second course, for example, of Berkshire pork
Cooking a private meal for Booz Allen Hamilton and its guests is one way that Craig Stoll and superstar chefs like him benefit from the broader rise of the super-elite. But in an aside that revealed the extent to which simultaneously catering to a mass audience has become part of the everyday menu for celebrity cooks, Kummer concluded the meal by informing the replete audience that Stoll hadn’t written a book “yet,” so as a keepsake of their meal of a lifetime—their
Cooks are just the latest tradesmen to understand that the most powerful way to cash in on superstar talent is to strike the right combination of very expensive personal service for the elite with a cheaper, mass-produced version. Tailors probably got there first. Their first revolutionary was Charles Frederick Worth. An Englishman who moved to Paris in 1825, Worth was the Elizabeth Billington of the clothing industry—a superstar who cashed in on the emergence in the nineteenth century of a super-rich European elite. To do that, Worth had to invent a new profession. Born in 1826, Worth started out in London and then in France as a draper. He saw an opportunity to expand the business by sewing clothes for his clients, not just selling them fabrics. Worth persuaded his initially hesitant employers to back his idea, and they opened a small dressmaking department. It became increasingly profitable, and Worth was made a partner in the firm. That success emboldened him to set up his own venture in 1858, financed by Otto Gustav Bobergh, a Swedish investor. Before long Worth had created a new superstar profession—haute couture—and become its first practitioner.
Worth sewed his label into his dresses. Rather than sewing clothes created by his clients, he invented modern fashion design by presenting his own styles four times a year, then custom producing them for his clients. Worth was an avid adopter of technology. The first reliable sewing machine was patented in Boston by Isaac Singer in 1851, seven years before Worth opened his dressmaking shop, and his seamstresses used sewing machines wherever that was quicker and more efficient than stitching by hand. Worth also enthusiastically used factory-made decorations such as ribbons and lace.
Worth made his name by assiduously courting the European aristocracy. An early client was Princess Pauline von Metternich, wife of Austria’s ambassador to France, and his success was assured when Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, began to wear his designs. But financially he was as much a beneficiary of America’s Gilded Age as were the Astors, Carnegies, and Vanderbilts, who sent their ladies to Paris to order their entire wardrobes. They would also make the transatlantic journey to buy dresses for special occasions, such as weddings or the lavish masquerades that, as with the 1897 Bradley Martin ball, were a fixture of late nineteenth-century elite social life.
Worth was more than a superstar tradesman. He was an innovator who created a new way of making and selling clothes to the rising European and American super-rich. In the 1870s, at the peak of his career, he was making $80,000 a year; some of his dresses sold for as high as $10,000. That was a fortune, to be sure. But just as Mrs. Billington’s earnings were limited by the number of people who could hear her perform in person, the six thousand to seven thousand gowns the House of Worth produced a year were each tailored to the body of a specific client.
But just as Charlie Chaplin’s superstardom dwarfed Elizabeth Billington’s since he could perform for the masses, fashion designers became exponentially richer when they expanded from the haute couture business to pret-a-porter. That revolution happened in 1966, when Yves Saint Laurent opened his first Rive Gauche ready-to- wear store on the rue de Tournon in the sixth arrondissement of Paris, less than two miles away from the original home of Worth and Bobergh, where Charles Worth had gone into business just over a century earlier.
It took the couturiers a long time to reap the benefits of mass production. That was partly because the sewing machine didn’t immediately translate into well-made and cheap clothes for women—the most lucrative designer market. The sizzle of mid-nineteenth-century inventive genius devoted to the sewing machine—call it the smartphone of the 1850s—almost immediately translated into mass production of military uniforms, for the U.S. Civil War and Europe’s Franco-Prussian War.
But factory-produced women’s clothes remained a difficult value proposition. As late as 1920, a study found that it was still cheaper to sew a dress at home, for an average cost of twenty dollars, than to buy it ready-made,
