Introduction: the dilemma of (dis)avowal

Early on in our project concerning a Swiss second-hand children’s clothing retailer (hereafter referred to as “Noa’s Closet”), Gwynne met with the cofounders of the business to discuss the specifics of our data collection process and the goals of the research.Footnote ¹ All three of these women—Gwynne, Isa, and Eline—are parents of young children, and their conversation that day was often focused on everyday issues related to mothering and consumerism as much as it was concerned with the details of the upcoming research. At one point, the women turned to the e-commerce company Temu, a retailer that ships discounted products direct from warehouses and factories in China. At the time (September 2023), Temu was becoming increasingly visible, and in 2024 it was ranked the third most popular marketplace in Switzerland.Footnote ² The women remarked that when searching for products online, Temu options were almost always included in the first few results, and their prices were shockingly low. While the cofounders of Noa’s Closet spoke passionately about resisting the temptation to support such a problematic company, Gwynne felt sheepish. Just a few days prior, she had purchased a wooden puzzle for her 18-month-old twins from Temu for less than a third of the price of locally available alternatives. She had felt guilty about the purchase at the time, but became even more ashamed during the conversation with Isa and Eline, such that she could not bring herself to publicly confess her apparent lapse in judgment.

Manning (Reference Manning2001) argued some time ago that certain indexical relationships transcend emergent, situational, and/or interactional contexts; his concept of “social deixis” refers to the perduring social relations that represent the larger moral and political economies of contemporary life (cf. Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003[Reference Silverstein1996] on orders of indexicality). These, of course, powerfully inform social actors’ pragmatic usage of signs. In this regard, the “indexical field” (see Eckert Reference Eckert2008, Reference Eckert2019) of progressive/responsible parenting has certain semiotic expectations that ensure community belonging. Relatedly, and as Keane (Reference Keane2018) theorizes, people’s daily semiotic practices and choices are meaning-making tools that serve to link their everyday, metapragmatic experiences to their beliefs about the world. These semiotic ideologies are highly dynamic and dependent on the “representational economy” of any historical or social context (68), accruing value and even “moral flavor” (see Gal Reference Gal2013, cited in Telbadi and Percio Reference Telbadi and Percio2026) based on a system of seemingly arbitrary relations that are at once perceived as logical and causal. In this way, Gwynne’s experience of guilt for her purchasing behavior in the opening vignette is an indication of the semiotic reflexivity demanded of modern-day consumers. Her choice to withhold information here not only achieves interactional consensus in the moment, but it also speaks to larger social expectations of class position and cultural belonging.

The semiotic ideologies guiding contemporary consumerism, in this sense, are particularly salient within Currid-Halkett’s (Reference Currid-Halkett2017) “aspirational class,” a fraction of the upper middle class that performs distinction not through overtly conspicuous consumption (à la Veblen) but rather through informed and sustainable consumerist practices. In this context, the act of purchasing organic food, well-crafted wooden toys, or curated second-hand children’s clothing serves as a means of signaling informed decision-making rather than ostentatious wealth. Material goods are thus imbued with meaning beyond function and style: they point as well to one’s ethical values, discerning taste, and cultural capital. These indexicalities, however, expose a looming tension: is it possible to be elite but not elitist? Is strategically masking one’s privilege a means of flattening or rather perpetuating social hierarchy? And furthermore, how are brands implicated in these processes?

Mapes’ (Reference Mapes2018, Reference Mapes2021) concept of “elite authenticity” helps to disentangle this theoretical debate. Stemming from Bourdieu’s (Reference Bourdieu1984) theory of distinction, elite authenticity describes a class-making practice by which distinction is “both (re)produced and (dis)avowed” and which appeals “to notions of genuineness, naturalness, and egalitarianism … all of which are rooted in and made possible by privilege and socioeconomic advantage” (Mapes and Ross Reference Mapes and Ross2020, 260). Mapes argues that elite authenticity is a defining feature of consumerism in late capitalism. It is organized and staged via five rhetorical strategies: historicity (e.g., a focus on tradition and continuity); simplicity (e.g., modesty and minimalism); lowbrow appreciation (e.g., a fascination with “the other” in terms of income, race, geography, and other classifiers); pioneer spirit (e.g., innovation and entrepreneurialism); and locality/sustainability (e.g., ecological and community responsibility). Together, these rhetorics allow eliteness to be simultaneously claimed and downplayed—to be discursively avowed and, in the same breath, disavowed. For example, and according to the rhetorical strategy of locality/sustainability, a second-hand clothing retailer that sells high-end brands allows consumers to responsibly purchase luxury goods without overtly conveying wealth or privilege. At the same time, however, they perform their “good taste” by rejecting fast fashion models of consumption and instead supporting a local business committed to reuse and ecological sustainability (see Steward Reference Steward2017). This is the discourse of elite authenticity in action, representing an array of ideological and semiotic practices that guide, reproduce, and obfuscate elite consumerist activity.

As a case in point, in this paper we rely on a pilot study comprising ethnographic participant observation in the Noa’s Closet stockroom, video-recorded meetings, and semi-structured interviews with the cofounders, as well as a complete archiving of the shop’s website via screenshots. Across these data, we identified the discourse of elite authenticity as a powerful semiotic strategy by which the business both builds up and downplays its elite status. Following Shankar’s (Reference Shankar2012) work on “model consumers,” this somewhat paradoxical brand identity demonstrates a narrative of indexical signs that serve to valorize the relationship between sustainability and luxury, encapsulating not only material products and marketing, but also a range of human stakeholders. In this regard, while our argument here incorporates the semiotics of branding (e.g., Nakassis Reference Nakassis2013), we are ultimately interested in the discursive ordering of people in our social world. This is what Silverstein (Reference Silverstein, Carr and Lempert2016) calls the “scaling of taste”—social categorization that is based on people’s material and consumerist preferences.

In what follows, we first outline the primary theoretical tacks that guide our study, paying specific attention to social class and taste (e.g., Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1984), indexicality and language materiality (e.g., Shankar and Cavanaugh Reference Shankar and Cavanaugh2012), and brand, citationality, and surfeits (e.g., Nakassis Reference Nakassis2013). From here, we explain the details of our data and methodology before turning to the analysis, which is organized according to the primary rhetorical strategies that crop up in the data: simplicity, pioneer spirit, and locality/sustainability. Ultimately, we conclude by arguing that the kind of ethical-cum-luxurious consumerism that Noa’s Closet represents points to the kinds of semiotic ideologies governing contemporary shoppers as they navigate highly competitive neoliberal marketplaces—all of which serve to reinforce cultural and class boundaries.

Social class and taste

Bourdieu’s (Reference Bourdieu1984) seminal thinking on social class maintains that it is a relational and dynamic structure that is constituted by multiple forms of capital: economic, social, symbolic, and cultural. For our purposes here, we focus especially on cultural capital, and the ways in which knowledge, education, and material objects are connected to “taste,” or one’s “manifested preferences” (56). Bourdieu famously writes that taste “classifies the classifier” (6); it therefore operates not merely as a marker of social status but also actively constructs and legitimizes class positions. This perspective underscores the idea that “good taste” is a semiotic practice—similarly, and as Thurlow and Jaworski (Reference Thurlow and Jaworski2017a) note, “elite” is something one does rather than something one is or simply possesses. In other words, language and other signs are actively imbricated in processes of status production. What we deem tasteful and valuable is a discursive accomplishment as much as it is backed by real, economic capital.

Nowadays, however, and due in part to what Thurlow (Reference Thurlow2016) calls “post-class ideologies,” what is or is not elite is harder to pinpoint; neoliberal capitalism pushes rhetorics of inclusivity and individualism, thereby obscuring structural class disparities. Currid-Halkett (Reference Currid-Halkett2017) draws on Khan’s (Reference Khan, Birtchnell and Caletrío2014) term of “rhetorical cover” to describe this masking of privilege with ethical, meritocratic ideals, highlighting how contemporary elites strategically and discursively erase their socioeconomic advantages by framing their social status as a result of personal effort and cultural sophistication (51; see also Mapes Reference Mapes2021). Importantly, members of Currid-Halkett’s aspirational class increasingly embed their privilege in cultural capital—in the knowledge of cultural codes and the meanings attached to particular products and practices (48). For example, Cotter and Valentinsson (Reference Cotter and Valentinsson2018) establish how specialized coffee discourse is characterized by class bivalency—that is, progressive, upper-middle class consumers are able to align with marginalized coffee producers in far-off locales while simultaneously participating in a high-status (and expensive) consumerist practice. Their argument is akin to Riley’s (Reference Riley2021) observations at an elite elementary school in New York City, where the moral economy of “good food” becomes entrenched in especially neoliberal and privileged ways of eating. In turn, and following Silverstein (Reference Silverstein, Carr and Lempert2016), the semiotics of elite life thus become markers of good taste, reinforcing a broader economy of social value and exclusion by which seemingly invisible hierarchies are made visible and tangible by human actors and their various material engagements.

Indexicality and language materiality

In his foundational discussion of indexical order, Silverstein (Reference Silverstein2003[Reference Silverstein1996]) not only captures the ways in which indexes point to particular interpretations of social actors and social life, but also how these associations are tied to both microlevel moments of context and to more macro, ideological processes. Put another way, language (and all semiotic activity) is a tool by which its users construct their beings and worlds; as Eckert (Reference Eckert2019) describes it, indexicality thus represents “a continual construal and reconstrual of signs” (754). Importantly, as different combinations of semiosis come together in distinct ways, people themselves become “indexical of particular categories of space, time, and personae, along with their imputed characterological attributes” (Gal Reference Gal2013, 34, citing Agha Reference Agha2007). Sign-users are thereby producers of social meaning beyond their pragmatic use of form, stylizing their speech, dress, food consumption, and so on in ways that conform (or don’t) to the various semiotic ideologies proliferating contemporary life. According to Eckert (Reference Eckert2008, Reference Eckert2019), this is how an array of ideological meanings come to be unified within one indexical field—a particular terrain of meaning-making in which various signs (linguistic and otherwise) work in tandem to “populate the social imagination” (Eckert Reference Eckert2008, 456) of particular, stylized personae. These shared ideological constructions are as much related to materials and objects as they are to people’s dialectal features and larger discursive practices, and as such, they are detectable across a vast range of semiotic activity. This is where Shankar and Cavanaugh’s (Reference Shankar and Cavanaugh2012, Reference Shankar, Cavanaugh, Cavanaugh and Shankar2017) heuristic of language materiality becomes germane.

Shankar and Cavanaugh (Reference Shankar, Cavanaugh, Cavanaugh and Shankar2017) contend that linguistic practices are embedded in and shaped by their broader socioeconomic contexts such that they derive meaning based on their interconnection to the patently neoliberal social world. As a case in point, Thurlow and Jaworski (Reference Thurlow, Jaworski, Cavanaugh and Shankar2017b) suggest that “word-things” and “thing-words” help capture the reciprocal relationship between language and material objects in social practice. Word-things describe how material items become linguistically animated, whereas thing-words illustrate how language itself can be materialized. For example, an online retailer might include an image of a sweater on its website as well as the linguistic descriptor “cashmere pullover.” The thing—a piece of clothing—derives important value from the word “cashmere,” an expensive and especially soft wool fabric that indexes luxury and refinement. Reciprocally, however, the word is made real by the corresponding image, which explicitly showcases the pullover’s desirable qualia (see Peirce Reference Peirce1998). According to Graber’s (Reference Graber2023) examination of Mongolian cashmere production, qualia entail the “experiences of sensorial qualities, such as the textures, sounds, or smells of objects, and feelings, such as anticipation, anxiety or distance” (188). All of these tangible and intangible aspects work in tandem to confirm and effectively materialize the language. Furthermore, we might also consider the potential human subject’s interaction with the sweater through their digital device, and the various embodied movements and affective deliberations that go into the decision to purchase this technologically mediated object. These are the sorts of analytical considerations that language materiality affords, revealing not only the indexical significance of objects in the construction of particular semiotic ideologies, but also the extent to which branding and marketing are caught up in everyday life.

Brands, citations, and surfeits

Our paper here contributes to a range of work across linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics that attends to brand as a complicated semiotic entity that is active, interdiscursive, and inherently social (e.g., Manning Reference Manning2010; Nakassis Reference Nakassis2012; Agha Reference Agha2015). Nakassis (Reference Nakassis2012) writes that brands “offer themselves up to us as tools for self-actualization and, thus, as the very context of sociality and community…” (629). In this way, and as others have also noted, consumers do not just purchase objects but rather choose the “aspirational lifestyles” (Arvidsson Reference Arvidsson2006) that come to be indexically layered onto the brands they buy. People therefore actively (co)produce—through their embodied, semiotic practices—the resulting indexical relationships between stuff, identity, and status.

In this regard, a key feature of Nakassis’ (Reference Nakassis2012) argument is a brand’s citationality—its ability to be reproduced as “exemplary” or authoritative, linking together multiple semiotic events in the production of capital. Importantly, any citation of a brand (e.g., its resale in a second-hand shop) conveys similarity and difference simultaneously; a fake designer bag draws on the authority of the original brand, while at the same time creating an entirely different commodity. As Agha (Reference Agha2015) puts it, items might appear to be the same physical objects, but they are not the same signs (our emphasis). Indeed, they populate diverse indexical fields, representing how differentiation functions amidst brand citationality to open up new possibilities of meaning-making and value production. Nakassis’ (Reference Nakassis2013) term “surfeit” nicely captures this sort of complexity. In essence, brand (re)productions effectively (re)fashion and build upon their original/authentic purpose. While he does not mention resale contexts specifically, a second-hand retailer represents one such surfeit—they capitalize on certain aspects of the brands they sell while at the same time producing their own brand image and identity. This is what Nakassis calls the “more than” of a brand.

To return to Agha (Reference Agha2015), these mediatized semiotic processes—links between communicative practices and forms of commoditization—are also central for “lifestyle formulations” (see also Agha Reference Agha2011), demonstrating how stereotypic indexical values are continually recycled and taken up across products, advertising, and various social personae. The “more than” of a brand surfeit thus comes to be valorized through repeated consumerist engagement. In the specific context of purchasing second-hand clothing, for example, Brusdal and Frønes (Reference Brusdal and Frønes2013) note that individuals accumulate “moral capital” by pursuing shared norms and behaviors that are perceived by others as especially “ethical.” This sort of capital is particularly powerful for parents, as it marks them as both resourceful and morally upright caregivers. A brand like Noa’s Closet can thus discursively differentiate itself as environmentally friendly or circulatory in its production practices in order to benefit from the symbolic power of ethical values—these indexicalities are then eventually embodied and reproduced by the targeted sub-market of the population. In the end, the production of value in neoliberal markets applies not just to the goods in circulation but also to the people who consume/animate them.

Our goal in bringing together these interconnected threads of scholarship—social class and taste, indexicality and language materiality, and brand, citationality, and surfeit—has been to illuminate the complex ways in which the production of social distinction is tied up in the patently commercialized semiotic processes that construct people’s daily lives. What we wish to examine is how the microlevel semiotic details of a second-hand children’s clothing shop serve to build up the more macro ideologies of ecological responsibility, neoliberal individualism/innovation, and luxury/status. Thus, our case study here sheds light on how sustainable consumerism connects to the ongoing production of social distinction in contemporary society.

Data and method

Noa’s Closet is an online retailer that, between 2019 and 2025, sold curated second-hand and second-season children’s wear.Footnote ³ The company was founded and operated entirely by Isa and Eline, following a business model in which they purchased products from various “trusted sellers”—often within their own customer base—and then resold them on their website.Footnote ⁴ The business was very much a “passion project” for the women founders, who had previously worked in digital product management and the luxury goods industry—their primary goal was to offer good quality circular fashion for kids. In the brand’s closing message to customers on their website, the founders write:

The brand’s moral stance here is clear—they claim that their business reduced waste (e.g., “saved” clothing from landfills) and effectively provided an alternative to “fast fashion.” Notably, these claims are highly affective ones—the clothing is described as “tiny,” and is imbued with “new life” because of Noa’s Closet. These descriptors index the innocence and purity of newborn babies, projecting a life-giving maternal identity onto the business (see Ourahmoune, Binninger, and Robert Reference Ourahmoune, Binninger and Robert2014 on “the myth of Gaia”). Additionally, the founders are “saddened” that their business could not survive due to mainstream “obsess[ive]” shopping practices. Again, these emotive lexemes point to the semiotic ideologies of consumerism in which various signs come to be imbued with morality, and consequently, with value. This is ultimately the narrative that drew us to Noa’s Closet as a potential site for research.

In the summer months of 2023, Gwynne contacted a number of businesses and schools based in Switzerland as part of a project aimed at understanding parent’s/children’s consumerism and education in progressive, high-end contexts. Her initial outreach, which included private education institutions in Switzerland as well as a number of ethical/sustainable retailers, elicited very few responses. However, the founders of Noa’s Closet were immediately interested in participating in the research, and as we mentioned earlier, Gwynne met with them in September to work out the details of their involvement.Footnote ⁵ At this time, Noëmi and Sara were MA students at the University of Bern, and were brought onto the project as the key researchers involved in data collection while Gwynne’s role became more of a supervisor/advisor.

Situated within the broader field of linguistic anthropology, the project included ethnographic fieldwork that was conducted between October and December 2023. We considered this to be pilot research for a future large-scale project and designed the data collection in a way that would be minimally invasive for the founders as busy working mothers. Our dataset includes field notes and photographs from a total of five 90-minute stockroom visits; four video-recorded business meetings that ranged in length, totaling 212 minutes of transcribed audio; two semi-structured interviews (one with each founder), totaling 65 minutes of transcribed audio; and 90 screenshots that archived the entirety of the Noa’s Closet website between September and October 2023. As the opening vignette in the introduction to this paper indicates, we followed the principles of researcher reflexivity throughout our data collection processes (e.g., Perrino and Pritzker Reference Perrino and Pritzker2022). We thus attempted to highlight our preconceived assumptions and emotional responses during fieldwork and routinely debriefed with each other in order to jointly make sense of our situated role in the production of these data.

Our theoretical/analytical approach to the dataset can be best described as critical discourse ethnography (see Macgilchrist and Van Hout Reference Macgilchrist and Van Hout2011) in that we attend to larger macro processes based on the micro details of discursive interaction. In other words, we aim to holistically document the web of relationships between the spoken language, material artifacts, visual representations, and written discourse that proliferate Noa’s Closet’s physical and digital presence. Our analytical process draws on a three-step approach following Thurlow and Aiello (Reference Thurlow and Aiello2007): we first used descriptive content analysis to track general patterns before moving into qualitative and critical discourse analysis in our further close readings of the data. While we initially expected to see elite authenticity in these data, we were struck by the real prevalence of all five rhetorical strategies: historicity, simplicity, lowbrow appreciation, pioneer spirit, and locality/sustainability. Table 1 outlines our characterization of these organizing principles in the context of the Noa’s Closet brand.

Table 1.

Elite authenticity in Noa’s Closet

Table 1 Long description

Historicity entails a focus on a brand’s “story” and lineage; Simplicity entails a general ethos of minimalism and modesity—single-source materials, muted and/or monochrome color palettes, emphasis on quality over quantity; Lowbrow Appreciation is an elevated embracing of practices (e.g., second-hand clothing) otherwise associated with the non-elite or cultural “other”; Pioneer Spirit is an appreciation of individualism, work ethic, and “countercultural”/innovative consumerist practices; Locality/Sustainability entails continuous references to circular fashion, organic materials, and ecological production practices

Because the three most prolific of the rhetorical strategies across the data were simplicity, pioneer spirit, and locality/sustainability, we focus on only these in the forthcoming analysis. We begin by highlighting Noa’s Closet’s attention to minimalism and simplicity, showcasing how this is especially caught up in the semiotics of materiality. Next, we center on pioneer spirit and the brand’s framing of its “community of practice” as innovative and entrepreneurial. Third, we attend to the principles of locality/sustainability and the specific ways in which the founders grapple with the ethics of running a profitable business. Across these three sections, we use a range of examples from our ethnographic fieldwork, including website images, fieldnotes, and interactional/interview data. Ultimately, we argue that Noa’s Closet—as a digital and physical site that (re)produces a myriad of linguistic and material practices and ideologies—is a powerful example of the sorts of status-producing semiotic processes that circulate around ethical consumerism, neoliberal success and advancement, and class positionalities. In other words, our case study offers a glimpse into the performance of contemporary social status, and how it is entangled with a simultaneous (dis)avowal of privilege and distinction.

Analysis: simplicity, pioneer spirit, locality/sustainability

Simplicity: the indexicalities of luxurious minimalism

As originally conceived by Mapes (Reference Mapes2018) in the context of elite food discourse, the rhetorical strategy of simplicity entails an attitude of “less is more” in the strategic design of language (e.g., menus), physical space (e.g., restaurant interiors), and material objects (e.g., food itself). The Noa’s Closet dataset follows a similar patterning. The landing page of their website is strikingly white and minimalist, incorporating pops of bright color that accentuate the stark purity of the background. Likewise, all clothing items are meticulously arranged and photographed on white paper so that the resulting website images appear clean and organized—squares in varying shades of white are arranged in symmetrical rows and columns, with a snapshot of the individual clothing item centered in each one (see Figure 1).Footnote ⁶ Aiello (Reference Aiello2011) points out that this kind of aesthetic follows the generic paradigms of stock photography and has increasingly come to be associated with contemporary high culture and symbolic capital (Aiello Reference Aiello2011, 71; cf. Machin Reference Machin2004). The Noa’s Closet website thus blurs the boundaries between consumerism and art, allowing customers to browse second-hand clothing in a refined digital space. Notably, the sterility here contrasts sharply with brick-and-mortar used clothing stores that are often cramped and crowded—with bodies, clothing, and other aural and odorant stimuli. The simplicity of Noa’s Closet is comparatively elegant, effectively elevating the experience of buying second-hand clothing to something akin to boutique shopping.

Figure 1.

Screenshot of children’s hats.

At the same time, however, the brand attempts to recreate the more physical elements of in-person consumerism with strategically simple semiotic cues. For example, Figure 1 includes a host of material descriptors that appear in a tiny, sans-serif font just below the carefully arranged clothing: “fleece-lined,” “knit,” “wool,” “silk cotton,” and “linen.” It is important to note that this is a selective practice, in that only certain items include fabric classifiers. This alludes to the ways in which material properties function as Bourdieu’s (Reference Bourdieu1984) status signifiers—they are symbolic markers of luxury. Other descriptors here fulfill a similar purpose. Specific brand names point to preferable price point, quality, and style (e.g., Minimalisma, Mini Rodini), serving as “citations” of credibility (see again Nakassis Reference Nakassis2012), while colors like “blush,” “ecru,” and “mint” convey the linguistic-cum-visual particularities of high-end children’s clothing. All of this stylization work contributes not only to the indexical associations between elite status and clothing choice, but also to the sorts of markedly invisible labor that have gone into their production. For Thurlow and Jaworski (Reference Thurlow, Jaworski, Birtchnell and Caletrío2014), this erasure of behind-the-scenes labor for the benefit of the customer is a classic marker of elite semiotic landscapes. And indeed, the website images contrast sharply with the physical reality of the business stockroom as it is depicted in Figure 2—here, the industrial clothing rails are packed tightly with merchandise and excess materials like hangers, cardboard, and plastic. The “backstage” (see Goffman Reference Goffman1959) of premium children’s clothing resale therefore appears to be similar to the lower-end shops that are more typical of the second-hand market. In this way, the artful minimalism and simplicity of the Noa’s Closet brand is a strategic, “frontstage” performance—a means of indexing its luxury and distinction for a particular class of consumer.

Figure 2.

Photograph of stockroom.

Figure 2 Long description

Black and white line drawing of stockroom, including clothing rails filled with children’s clothing and boxes. On the left side, there is also a table with assorted materials laying on top as well as a children’s stroller placed between the rails and the table.

The “taste of luxury” (see Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1984) of Noa’s Closet customers was mentioned by Eline during her interview. When Noëmi asked her to describe the shared values that help build the Noa’s Closet community of shoppers, Eline seems to rely on the rhetorical strategy of simplicity to explain that their customers are “the opposite of the Temu client”:

Extract 1. Interview with Eline

Eline begins her response by crafting an “idealized consumer” (Manning Reference Manning2010, 44) who is especially skilled and knowledgeable: they “[excel] in their field,” “they are interested,” “they know about quality brands within kidswear” (lines 2–4). Following Urban and Koh (Reference Urban and Koh2015), this description is an indication of the ways in which business corporations effectively produce and circulate social meaning: they are “creations of a world in which signs are in constant motion” (S11). The relationship between knowing about high-quality children’s clothing and professional success seems rather arbitrary, yet for Eline, the two are indexically linked. The act of shopping at Noa’s Closet is one sign (among many) of successful personhood—following Nakassis (Reference Nakassis2013) on surfeits, this is part of the “more than” of the Noa’s Closet brand. She goes on to say that their customers “do not purchase blindly” nor “a lot,” resulting in a “quite curated lifestyle” (lines 4–5). This sort of selective, minimalistic shopping practice is akin to the New York Times reviews that praise restaurants for their short list of menu offerings and curated wine lists (see Mapes Reference Mapes2018). Noa’s Closet shoppers thus possess a particular sort of cultural capital that allows them to choose fastidiously (and correctly) between an array of options, demonstrating once again how the semiotic preference for simplicity comes to be recycled and revalorized as an ideological index for class and taste.

Eline’s criticism of Temu clients points to another indication of the rhetorical strategy of simplicity. She says that these shoppers purchase “so much stuff and often low quality” (line 17), describing—with hedging—this practice as “the opposite of our client” (18). This contrast between the two kinds of consumers serves to implicitly label the Temu brand as negative via Eline’s use of the quantifier “so much” as well as the descriptor “low quality.” However, she also precedes this characterization with an explicit evaluation: “hh I don’t like it at all” (line 15). Her laughter here (which is also repeated by the interviewer) indicates a certain hesitation or discomfort with her opinion of the brand and its associated clientele, which is arguably reinforced by her hedging (“I guess”) in line 18. It appears that while Eline is critical of excess (which inevitably produces waste; cf. Thurlow et al. (Reference Thurlow, Pellanda and Wohlgemuth2022)), she is also perhaps cognizant that her preference is classed; indeed, the consumerist ideal of simplicity is deeply entangled with the values and logics of privileged consumption. This, too, is how Shankar and Cavanaugh’s (Reference Shankar and Cavanaugh2012) “language materiality” operates: semiotic meaning and political economic value are intricately entwined, such that the indexical field of circular fashion cannot be separated from the discursive production of status and distinction.

Pioneer spirit: a community of practice of “first-movers”

Mapes (Reference Mapes2018) builds on Trilling’s (Reference Trilling1972) observation that the pursuit of authenticity in contemporary culture privileges individual agency and self-awareness, both of which are central to contemporary neoliberal ideologies. According to Mapes, this ideology not only celebrates self-determination but also serves to normalize and justify privilege—these markedly classed practices are reframed as reasonable and natural. Allusions to a “pioneer spirit,” characterized by autonomy and entrepreneurial drive, are thus key to the staging of elite authenticity. This rhetorical strategy surfaces in two interconnected ways in our data: first, in how the cofounders of Noa’s Closet describe themselves and their entrepreneurial journey, and second, in how they position their customers (and merchandise providers/collaborators) as a like-minded “community of practice” (e.g., Wenger Reference Wenger1998). For example, after recounting her career trajectory and work experience in some detail, in Extract 2 Isa describes stay-at-home motherhood as the reason for beginning her business:

Extract 2. Interview with Isa

Note the casual phrasing with which Isa describes her movement from full-time mother to business founder, signaling a form of entrepreneurial experimentation that appears detached from economic necessity. The repetition of the verb try in “try entrepreneurship” (line 2), “try something” (line 5), and “try a project like this” (line 6) implies optionality, flexibility, and even recreation, suggesting that this venture is more about personal fulfillment and experimentation (e.g., “I always wanted to start something for myself,” line 2) than financial gain. This aligns closely with the neoliberal logic of self-actualization, where the self becomes a project to be continually developed, and entrepreneurialism is framed as a lifestyle choice rather than a material imperative (see also Mapes Reference Mapes2021 on Brooklyn restaurateurs).

While this framing reflects a significant degree of privilege—the capacity to explore entrepreneurship on one’s own terms, without the pressure of immediate financial return—Isa’s pioneer spirit is also entangled with motherhood, encompassing an assemblage of signs that serve to complicate the performance of neoliberal risk-taking (cf. Gershon Reference Gershon2011). Her references to being home with her daughter (line 1) and “on maternity leave with a small baby” (lines 4–5) point to a host of affective, embodied activities (e.g., breastfeeding and diaper-changing) that do not align with business creation and implementation. Indeed, the closing message on the Noa’s Closet website describes building the business “during nap times, post-bedtime night shifts, and even newborn cuddles in hospital beds.” The founders’ experiences as mothers of young children were thus firmly enmeshed with the beginnings of their business. Notably, however, despite the physical and emotional constraints of parenting, Isa frames her maternity leave as a catalyst for Noa’s Closet: “it was- kind of an ideal time to try something” (line 5). In this way, and following Eckert (Reference Eckert2008) on indexical field, a seemingly disparate combination—early motherhood coupled with entrepreneurialism—results in a particular layering of semiotic activity that becomes unified under one ideological orientation: the initiative and agency represented by the rhetorical strategy of pioneer spirit. Further, this portrayal supports the idea that, under neoliberalism, motherhood itself can become a site of self-definition and entrepreneurial success (see Cairns, Johnston, and MacKendrick Reference Cairns, Johnston and MacKendrick2013). In this context, Isa is not constrained by her maternal role; instead, her career becomes a key indicator of the capacity to balance, if not transcend, traditional expectations of motherhood.

Just as the founders self-construct as pioneers navigating both business and parenthood on their own terms, they similarly frame their customers as like-minded, forward-thinking actors who, through their consumerist choices, also embody this ethos.

Extract 3 is taken from our interview with Eline; after discussing various Noa’s Closet customers who she finds “fascinating,” including a human-rights lawyer and mountain restauranteur, she was asked to describe the typical Noa’s Closet customer:

Extract 3. Interview with Eline

In line 1, Eline describes their clientele as “first movers,” implying the kind of personal agency and opportunity-seeking that are characteristic of pioneer spirit. While she acknowledges that their motivations may differ, her emphasis lies on a shared disposition toward what she calls a “different lifestyle” (line 2). Her comment suggests that Noa’s Closet customers are marked not only by their early adoption of circulatory consumerist practices but also by a presumed capacity for semiotic reflexivity—the ability to reflect on and choose between different sign vehicles (see Keane Reference Keane2018). Eline thus seems to construct her customer base in line with Wenger’s (Reference Wenger1998) fundamental features of communities of practice, in that they pursue shared goals (e.g., sustainable consumerism) and repertoires (e.g., worldview/lifestyle).

It is noteworthy that her discourse here is actively moralized (see Montiegel Reference Montiegel2021 on “moral meaning-making”). First movers are “not typical” but rather “ahead of their time” (lines 3–4) and as such, they are individuals whose choices reflect a principled and moral commitment to future-oriented, sustainable living. Of course, this particular semiotic ideology is produced through embodied interactional practices—shopping at Noa’s Closet is a sign-making enterprise through which sustainable consumerism comes to index luxury and status. And indeed, in their interviews, both cofounders distinguished their clientele from more economically driven customers, noting that “choosing” second-hand is more of a “statement” than a financial necessity for the typical Noa’s Closet shopper. Thus, the Noa’s Closet community members—both customers and founders—are not just consumers and producers; rather, they are forward-thinking ethical agents committed to differentiation, demonstrating how individual performances of elite authenticity might function to construct and maintain more collective elite identities moment-to-moment (e.g., Van de Mieroop Reference Van de Mieroop, Fina and Georgakopoulou2015).Footnote ⁷

Another example of this can be seen in Figure 3, a partial screenshot of the “News” section of the Noa’s Closet website where the founders post collaborations, interviews, and other information pertaining to the business. Each subject line is accompanied by a corresponding image, all of which are “narrative” in nature, representing actions or events (see Kress and van Leeuwen Reference Kress and van Leeuwen2006). For example, this extract features (stylish) children in various stages of play and activity—eating ice cream, jumping on a bed, holding a container of bubbles, and interacting with a sibling. These images seem to follow Nakassis’ (Reference Nakassis2017) thinking concerning more cinematic representations; they are “figurations of, and thus in certain contexts are, haptic forces that entangle and encompass, reach out to grab and act on who and what is seen” (219). The real semiotic pull and/or push of this narrative imagery thus serves to effectively construct the Noa’s Closet brand. While Telbadi and Percio (Reference Telbadi and Percio2026) observe that brands can help to build a community of like-minded thinkers (in their specific case, far-right racists in the UK), here, portraits of Noa’s Closet community members “reach out” to build the brand as high-end, child-focused, and entrepreneurial.

Figure 3.

“News” page on Noa’s Closet website.

Figure 3 Long description

Four black and white line drawn images accompanied by text and date underneath each, corresponding with a news post by Noa’s Closet. All images feature children either standing with their mother, playing with a bubbles container, or playing with a sibling.

These more visual signs are reinforced by linguistic cues (most of which we have obscured to protect anonymity). For example, “We stand with Ukraine” contextualizes the visual representation of a child adorned in the distinctive blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, while also taking a sociopolitical stance. The other featured posts highlight two women entrepreneurs and social media influencers in Switzerland. The first, pictured in the top-left image with her two children, is an artist; here she is labeled an “inspiring parent,” pointing again to the ways in which Noa’s Closet’s various mediatized discourses “imbue diverse sensory objects with brand-specific indexical values” (Agha Reference Agha2015, S177). The crafted persona and image of the entrepreneurial artist thus not only represent the “first movers” of the brand’s target market but also its founders’ neoliberal claims to innovation and hard work amidst the responsibilities of parenting.

The second featured entrepreneur is a social media influencer/content creator whose children are pictured in the top-right and bottom-right images. These two posts demonstrate a unique linguistic formula that serves to specifically characterize Noa’s Closet merchandise as high-end. Each image is accompanied by the formulaic text: “Noa’s Closet X [Name of Social Media Influencer]”; in high-fashion contexts, this “X” construction signals collaboration between designers or other brands, tending to mark collections that are especially sought-after or contain a limited supply.Footnote ⁸ The use of this linguistic formula for Noa’s Closet entails a different kind of collaboration, of course—the shop has purchased kidswear from this particular content creator, and customers can now buy the items they’ve seen her children wearing on social media. The significance of this practice is twofold. First, Noa’s Closet draws on the language of high-fashion to market used clothing, representing a purposeful link between these two different signs. Second, by collaborating in this way with a local entrepreneur, Noa’s Closet ensures that their shoppers support not only their own women-owned business, but also that of the influencer. All participants are thus roped in to this pioneering, collective community of practice.

In sum, and drawing again on Agha (Reference Agha2015), this sort of semiotic layering creates “a composite artifact, where different sign values are sedimented into it (or formulated for it) through distinct metasemiotic practices and value projects, which need not have the same source or organization” (S180). In other words, the brand is complicatedly comprised of these various indexical links—appeals to the personal merit and innovation of pioneer spirit are caught up in the production of distinction and “good taste,” thus discursively (dis)avowing the systemic advantages that make these forward-thinking, “different lifestyle[s]” possible (see again Extract 3). Ultimately, this is another means by which the discourse of elite authenticity works to normalize the patently privileged consumerist practices of Noa’s Closet.

Locality/sustainability: the realities of building an eco-friendly business

Various scholars have documented the ways in which sustainable and especially local consumption in contemporary society is imbued with value (e.g., Brusdal and Frønes Reference Brusdal and Frønes2013; Blum Reference Blum, Cavanaugh and Riley2017). Again, this is all imbricated in the moral economies of lifestyle “choice,” and the ethics of consumerism amidst questions of human poverty and planetary health (see Micheletti, Stolle, and Berlin Reference Micheletti, Stolle, Berlin, Warde and Southerton2012 on “sustainable citizens”). However, and as Cock (Reference Cock2011) points out, sustainability has increasingly become a strategic marketing tool rather than an expressly ethical commitment. Specifically, businesses transform ecological responsibility into an economic asset, thus converting “ethical capital” (see Lewis and Huber Reference Lewis and Huber2015) into cash.

In the context of Noa’s Closet, the situation is altogether more complex. Our ethnographic fieldwork revealed many moments of circular/sustainable practices; for example, the founders told us they donate clothes that they cannot sell, or give them to local daycares for further use. The women also rely on recycled cardboard boxes to ship all their products, using customized notes and packaging tape to elevate these otherwise nondescript and markedly reused receptacles. In another instance, Eline explained that she usually buys clothes for her son that are too big for him so that he can wear them for longer and get the most use out of them, illustrating how sustainability is not only a business-oriented ideal for the two founders but also reportedly an integral part of their private lives as well. In other words, Noa’s Closet’s engagement with sustainability does not appear to be just a strategic brand performance, although it is certainly an important part of their distinction in the Swiss children’s clothing market. Part of this commitment to circular fashion involves avoiding the resale of brands from large chains or discounter stores known for rampant overproduction and waste. After being asked to describe what kinds of clothes they do not offer at Noa’s Closet, for example, Isa lists several unacceptable brands, along with an explanation of “Zara” as an exception to this standard:

Extract 4. Interview with Isa

As Jaworski and Thurlow (Reference Jaworski, Thurlow and Jaffe2009) note, elitist stancetaking—the construction of superiority in discourse—is often accomplished via negation, or put another way, by social actors’ framing of certain objects or experiences as especially undesirable. Here, Isa adopts this perspective with regard to two brands specifically, C&A and Migros, both of which are known in Switzerland for retailing mass-produced children’s clothing. While her stance implies that Noa’s Closet encompasses a more high-end brand identity, Isa seems hesitant to articulate this—her explanation is marked by a lengthy pause (line 3) and other hedging devices such as “you know,” “u:mm,” and “uh” (lines 1–2). When describing these undesirable brands she also tries to avoid the term “low end,” prefacing this characterization with “I don’t want to say, like, not low end” (line 3). However, this mitigation is somewhat contradicted by the language she ultimately chooses to describe the brands; Isa says they represent “cheaper” clothing, and the “cheapest part of the market” (line 4).

As with Eline’s “Temu” reference in Extract 1, Isa’s discourse represents an interesting iteration of Nakassis’ (Reference Nakassis2012) brand citationality, in that these references to C&A and Migros do not draw on their respective authority as brands but rather showcase the ways in which they are specifically lacking. In this way, Noa’s Closet strategically disaligns with the overproduction and low quality indexed by these mass-market clothing retailers; the business is framed as incompatible with this kind of “discounter” (line 1) ideology. At the same time, however, Isa admits that they make “an exception” by reselling items from Zara (line 4), a fast fashion powerhouse well-known for its rampant overproduction and negative environmental impact (see Baena Reference Baena2024). This appears to be an instance in which economic interests outweigh the ethical imperatives of Noa’s Closet; Isa says the brand “works really well for us” (line 5) based on “quality” (line 6), “style” (line 7), and “price point” (line 8), alluding primarily to the shared aesthetic and financial preferences of their customer base. This is how, in the context of Noa’s Closet, Zara is transformed into an entirely new sign, demonstrating again how Nakassis’ (Reference Nakassis2013) term “surfeit” operates—because Noa’s Closet indexes simplicity, pioneer spirit, and locality/sustainability, an array of new social meanings are projected onto the brands they resell. Rather than signaling fast fashion and lower quality, here Zara clothing comes to represent fiscal responsibility and circularity. And, in the very act of purchasing Zara pieces from Noa’s Closet, consumers consequently coproduce and revalorize this “more than” of the surfeit.

However, and as with earlier in the extract, Isa’s admission is scattered with hedging devices (e.g., “um,” line 5), as well as false starts such as “I think, the-” (lines 5–6) and “it’s kind of, it’s y’know” (line 8). This sort of linguistic mitigation is also accentuated by a marked use of High Rising Terminals (HRT) throughout lines 4–7—together, these micro-linguistic and prosodic cues seem to serve as interpersonal requests for “alignment” or “affiliation” with the interviewer (see Levon Reference Levon2016 on the gendered use of HRT in London). In other words, Isa is perhaps seeking validation or support for a business decision that seems to go against the brand’s commitment to high-end sustainability. Her discourse here is an attempt to bring the more incongruous indexicalities of Zara into alignment with the ethical-cum-elite identity of the Noa’s Closet brand.

There were various other moments in which we observed Isa and Eline negotiating the tension between profitability and eco-friendly practices. For example, after their standard supplier of children’s clothing hangers went out of business, the founders deliberated whether they should drive to Germany to buy affordable hangers directly, or simply order them from a business in China. Another interesting dilemma occurred when they were discussing carrying a new brand, Kidkii, in the online shop.

Extract 5. Zoom business meeting

Initially, both women seem to be enthusiastic about selling Kidkii items because they “have friends” who like the brand and because they assume the items are “made in Europe” (lines 4–5). However, this initial enthusiasm subsides as soon as Eline finds out that the products are actually made in China—Isa immediately voices her rejection with “ohoh ohoh not happening” (line 10), presumably shutting down further discussion. This is in line with a statement she made during her interview in which she voiced her disagreement concerning businesses who “import stuff from China and re-label it.” Nevertheless, and after several minutes of discussion, Eline specifies that Kidkii is a “good … Nordic brand” (line 11, our emphasis) garnering Isa’s tentative acceptance: “Okay, I like that” (line 12). This reorienting seems to represent what Nakassis (Reference Nakassis2013) calls a “brand fetish,” in that the emotional appeal of the brand’s Scandinavian roots supersedes the realities of its production. Rather, it becomes “an inanimate thing that animatedly speaks to us” (113), projecting particularly valuable qualities and associations onto producer and consumer alike.

Ultimately, and as Isa remarked during her interview, Scandinavian/Nordic brands “work really well” for Noa’s Closet, and in the interest of keeping their business viable the founders seem willing to risk the moral ramifications of selling Chinese-made goods. While they strategically display and communicate circularity as a point of elite distinction for their brand, this is complicatedly entangled with the neoliberal realities of owning a small business, and perhaps also indicative of what Manning (Reference Manning2010, 36) calls the “dematerialization” of the brand. Indeed, Noa’s Closet is a “semiotic phenomenon” that is altogether distinct from its products. Although the two founders fight “tiny battles” for circular and slow fashion in their business each day (see again Telbadi and Percio Reference Telbadi and Percio2026), their claims to distinction on the grounds of locality/sustainability are ultimately tied to the semiotic ideology of their brand identity rather than to the realities of the brand’s merchandise. In other words, while Noa’s Closet is certainly a circular business contingent on second-hand resale, it is the semiotic performance of this circularity that is key for constructing its prestige and value. Following the discourse of elite authenticity, sustainability is thus co-opted as a rhetorical strategy in the service of status production.

Conclusion: the semiotic construction of “ethical” eliteness

In collecting and reflecting on these data, we have been struck by the many and minute signs by which privilege circulates. We watched as a tiny cashmere sweater was carefully packed into a repurposed box, and witnessed minuscule pieces of dust and debris being methodically removed from clothing before pricing. We saw shipping labels being reaffixed and adjusted just-so, and listened to conversations concerning children’s items from designers like Dolce and Gabbana, Gucci, and Stella McCartney. Indeed, the abundance of terms like “high quality,” “curated,” and “hand-selected” across the Noa’s Closet website is a linguistic indicator of how claims to exclusivity proliferate the indexical field of “responsible” consumerist practices. Thurlow (Reference Thurlow2021) writes that this particular breed of floating signifiers offers “a generalized, unspecified index of prestige, good taste and distinction” (130)—these terms help to inconspicuously construct luxury amidst the more lowbrow appeal of second-hand shopping. This is how the discourse of elite authenticity allows ostensibly affluent people to reproduce privilege while at the same time doing good for the world—to conceal and even disparage conspicuous wealth while simultaneously benefiting from a system that prioritizes the production of capital (see Cotter and Valentinsson Reference Cotter and Valentinsson2018). As Keane (Reference Keane2018) observes in the epigraph above, it is also how various signs come to be ideologically grounded in the political economic realities of daily life.

In this paper, we have argued that ethical consumerism can be harnessed as a vehicle for producing luxury and distinction, therefore reinforcing cultural and class boundaries. In the context of Noa’s Closet, this is achieved via the five rhetorical strategies that comprise elite authenticity (see again Table 1), with simplicity, pioneer spirit, and locality/sustainability holding particular salience. In the first section of analysis, we demonstrated how Noa’s Closet seeks to elevate and sterilize the traditional second-hand shopping experience by relying on semiotic indicators of elegance and minimalism. This includes a prominent use of white space on their website, various linguistic-cum-material artifacts, as well as strategic brand citationality—all of which represent the complex semiotic entanglement of stuff and status production. Second, we documented Isa and Eline’s self-framing as “first movers,” showing how their discourse effectively creates a community of practice of like-minded mothers (and entrepreneurs) who are committed to the self-reflection and innovation characteristic of pioneer spirit. This suggests not only how individual performances of elite authenticity circulate, but also how these more collective, group identities take shape dynamically across various semiotic practices. Importantly, this composite indexical layering of especially neoliberal pursuits with the moral imperatives of circular fashion allows the founders to simultaneously avow and disavow elite distinction. Lastly, in the final section we oriented specifically to Noa’s Closet’s claims to sustainability in their branding, noting the ways in which Isa and Eline market the business as eco-friendly while also actively employing this ethos in their daily practices. Here we revealed the tensions that arise around aligning with the rhetorical strategy of locality/sustainability and drawing a profit; while some mass-produced brands are pointedly disavowed, others are embraced and refashioned for the purposes of profitability. In this way, our data represent the real range of semiotic activity that characterizes high-end, second-hand shopping and likewise, the sorts of discursive negotiations that are demanded of all discerning neoliberal citizens as they engage in the game of status production.

In his paper on the semiotics of brand, Manning (Reference Manning2010) discusses how particular characters and personas come to be indexed by trademarks and their products. Citing Lury (Reference Lury2004, 46), he writes that brands “extend a prosthetic persona into a retail context, ‘to reach over the shoulder of the retailer straight to the consumer’” (38). Our argument here is that when it comes to Noa’s Closet, it is not just the various brands they sell that become figures or lifestyles to be purchased by the consumer—rather, the second-hand retail shop itself reaches over the shoulder of these other brands, a semiotic process by which luxury goods are imbued with additional meaning. As a result, material merchandise and shoppers alike index the discriminating taste and ethical values of Currid-Halkett’s “aspirational class,” obfuscating the privilege that is nonetheless mapped onto their physical forms and practices. Put another way, and following the epigraph, this is the presupposed world of buying a second-hand cashmere sweater for one’s baby—“the life that world recommends” (Keane Reference Keane2018) is one in which signs of status are masked by the ideological apparatus of elite authenticity. Our pilot research here thus illuminates how the microlevel semiotic details of a second-hand children’s clothing shop serve to build up the more macro ideologies of ecological responsibility, neoliberal individualism, and luxury/status. This is one example of how sustainable consumerism can be implicated in the ongoing production of social distinction in contemporary society.