Thesis advisor: Juliet B. Schor / Thesis advisor: Danielle Hedegard / To date, consumption and culture scholars have not considered the impact of occupations that require workers to perform the desire for an elite, moneyed lifestyle through conspicuous consumption. I use participant observation and interviews among a lifestyle brand's producers and consumers to address this fissure. The analysis considers the lifestyle clothing brand Island Outfitters as it is created for and employed by the young male finance community aspiring to the top 1% of wage earners on Wall Street. I document how this brand is both created and consumed cynically by the cultural intermediaries responsible for its formation and the status-savvy consumers who perform loyalty to its goals of affluence. The argument is set in a homogenous high-status American occupational group within which many of the preconditions that motivate conspicuous consumption in a traditionally Veblenian sense still exist. The lived experiences of these workers are far more nuanced than this utilitarian goal suggests, yet informants express their complicity with the profit prescriptive by employing recognizable aesthetic scripts that are read for whiteness, conservatism, and wealth. Because it is too problematic for these young men to embody the goals of global finance in their everyday decisions, they texturize their professional identities with textiles. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

This research aims to examine the logos of lifestyle brands and explore whether certain logo colors elicit a purchase response in consumers. Color Theory and Impression Management Theory are examined alongside the idea of this study. Two-hundred-nine United States residents 18 years of age and older who are not color blind or color deficient participated in a voluntary online survey where they were presented with several differently colored lifestyle brand logos and then prompted to choose which color of lifestyle brand logo would prompt them to purchase a product from the brand in question. The variables of gender, age and, favorite color were also examined in the survey. Results from Qualtrics Survey Software and SPSS showed that even though an individual chose a certain color as their favorite color, that favorite color was not always the color they chose when choosing the preferred color of a lifestyle brand logo.