An expanding luxury land: A journey through the magical world which TV series are offering to their teenage audience

Résumé En

American television series aimed at teenagers and young adults have recently been displaying a taste for luxury. This trend, which started in the early 1990s, has considerably developed during the last two decades, in particular thanks to such series as Gossip Girl or 90210.The progress of this particular taste in a context of mass culture is paradoxical. Indeed, mass media induces the idea that culture is shared by a large number of people and is no longer the privilege of the elite. At first, the vehicles allowing the development of mass culture were elementary schooling, newspapers, railways, and post office. The expanding level of literacy was fueled by a variety of publications made available thanks to the new infrastructures. Owing to these diverse progresses, an utterly new mass media culture has been developing starting from Western countries since the middle of the 19th Century (Mollier et al., 2009). This meant a fundamental change from previous centuries. In this development, the youth were a target as well as means. What does one see at the beginning of the 21st century? Mass culture aimed at young people promoting a form of elitism made up of conspicuous luxury consumption, success, and extensive leisure. It may seem a tribute to Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, first published in 1899.