For 250 years, the American dream has been fodder for a potent national brand.
Little wonder that since he began running for president, Donald Trump, perhaps the most active executive brand manager in history, has repeatedly invoked the idea: declaring it dead, positioning himself as its champion, announcing it has been restored.
Often he seems to be talking about a purchase of some kind, like a home, a yacht, a freshened-up face, an ever more gilded fantasyland of success.
Yet when the American dream – or at least the idea that later became the American dream – was born along with the country, it looked very different.
Initially defined by the founders as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, that dream was reimagined by each generation and wave of immigrants.
As a collection of values (like any brand) it often had less to do with material value than abstract values like liberty, revolution, aspiration, security and reinvention.
Perhaps the best way to think of it is as a “mythic construct”, said Jim Cullen, the author of The American Dream: A Short History Of An Idea That Shaped A Nation.
One in which, he said, “freedom is the currency of self-realisation, which gets reflected in outward presentation that ratifies one’s hope, or one’s status in culture”.
In other words, one way to understand the way the American dream has evolved may be to consider the different styles Americans designed for the world they were inventing.
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Freedom and revolution
It began with the chance to define a new set of laws and governance, to reject the inherited trappings (or traps) of class.
“To escape from Old World fetters and start over again,” said Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University and author of The Rise Of American Democracy: Jefferson To Lincoln.
The Founding Fathers dressed the part, taking their cues from the fashions of Britain and France and simplifying them.
“In terms of silhouette, in terms of embellishments, there was always a sort of underlying sense of, not puritanism per se, but pulling back,” said Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the man behind the show American Woman: Fashioning A National Identity.
George Washington may have powdered his hair, but he rejected the wig.
Benjamin Franklin, who built a printing empire in Philadelphia, “was as attuned to self-presentation as anyone in American history”, Cullen said.
It was not an accident that when he was ambassador to France, Franklin represented his country with a beaverskin cap.
He understood the story that was being constructed had to do with the promise of new frontiers.
A century later, the same promise was embodied by Buffalo Bill and his fellow pioneers, who helped build the myth of the West and created an enduring style of their own, albeit one that borrowed heavily, and without acknowledgment, from the Indigenous cultures that were being displaced.
Throughout the 1800s, that myth helped turn functionality and practicality into a virtue in dressing symbolised by the jeans invented by Levi Strauss.
That same spirit was adapted by the Gibson girls of the late 19th century, whose clothes reflected a newfound independence and love of action, captured for posterity by artist Charles Dana Gibson, whose work gave them their name.
It was taken to an even further extreme by the flappers of the early 20th century, represented by Clara Bow and Josephine Baker, who rejected the corset with all its real and metaphorical limitations in exchange for unprecedented physical emancipation.
Four decades later, the hippies would carry that torch, shrugging off fashion niceties the way they shrugged off antiquated ideas about sex and society.
At the same time, the Black liberation movement created a modern version of the militant, challenging conventional notions of what rebellion looked like.
Its disciplined fashion communicated a powerful message of revolutionary intentions and solidarity.
Affluence and aspiration
Still, the term “American dream” wasn’t officially coined until 1931, when popular historian James Truslow Adams wrote the bestseller The Epic Of America.
It codified the idea of the dream as “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement”.
Which later came to mean material attainment and conspicuous consumption.
“Making it was a big part of it,” said Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
Or rather, being “self-made”.
The foundation was originally laid by the second and third sons of the British aristocracy who emigrated to the new colonies to build the estates that primogeniture denied them.
In the South especially, they re-created the grand homes and the elaborate fashions of England (as well as its worst caste structures).
Later, the trappings of immense and visible wealth became the provenance of the self-made men of the Gilded Age, whose fortunes ushered in the era of generational wealth and created an archetype that was, Bolton said, “exported around the world".
“Henry James wrote about it, Edith Wharton wrote about it,” Bolton said.
All that opulence in environment and fashion was preserved in oils by John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase.
A more exuberant counterpoint was created during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, which challenged stereotypes and canonised Black style. Zoot suits, silk, satin and pearls dominated the dance floors.
The second gilded age arrived in the 1980s, with a bigger-is-better ethos reflected in the grand talk and grander shoulders of the time, all of it memorialised in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire Of The Vanities and embodied by the taffeta-clad gala-going wives of the new Wall Street robber barons.
By the late 1990s, video maestro Hype Williams was ushering in the shiny suit era of hip-hop, followed by Jay-Z and Co., sailing into the sun on a megayacht in Big Pimpin in 2000.
As the millennium turned, bling and brands were remixed into cultural currency by artistes like 50 Cent, Missy Elliott, Biggie Smalls and Lil’ Kim, who built images and empires out of the totems of the 1%.
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Security and reinvention
Along with financial success came another version of the American dream, one that had less to do with bling and more to do with security.
It was a sense of belonging expressed through assimilation, as well as the acquisition of actual belongings.
It was after 1945, Wilentz said, when snagging the brass ring started to resemble “owning your own home, preferably in the suburbs, having stable year-round employment and making sure your children would do better than their parents’ generation”.
In the 1950s, that fantasy took the real-life form of the man in the grey flannel suit, picket fences and poodle skirts – at least until Doris Day gave way to the dependably preppy style of the Ivy League.
In the early and mid-1960s, the Kennedy clan dressed up their political ambitions in the crew necks, polos and chinos of the Boston Brahmins.
And the self-respect conveyed through the dignity of Sunday best became a weapon wielded by Black Americans in the fight for basic freedoms during events such as the March on Washington in 1963.
Not quite two decades later, Martha Stewart cooked up a new version of suburban life, repackaging her kitchen in Connecticut as a kind of apple pie paradise and herself as a domestic goddess.
The one thing all of these versions of the American dream have in common, however, is the belief in the power and right of every person to reinvention and optimisation in any way available.
It was the premise on which Hollywood was built, starting in the Golden Age with the soft-focus, idealised and manufactured beauty of stars like Jean Harlow, Lena Horne and Greta Garbo, whose fame was its own kind of fortune.
Not to mention the promise inherent in the high-wattage sparkle of disco, where every song and sequin was electrified, as well as the physical perfection dangled by the aerobics age that followed, channelled most effectively by Jane Fonda in her 1982 VHS workout tape, which became one of the bestselling home videos of all time.
Reinvention was the basis of the rejection of the old corporate uniform by the social media pioneers of Silicon Valley, who introduced the “zero dress code”, redefining office wear to suggest they were redefining industry, making it accessible to all.
By the 2010s, it became the platform on which the Kardashians introduced themselves, becoming the ultimate avatars of the influencer economy in which celebrity through self-modification was an end in itself.
In many ways, Trump’s version of the American dream is simply a throwback to the set dressing and costumes of the former gilded ages, viewed through the lens of televised materialism.
But even as it may seem increasingly stale and commodified, kitschy and tainted, the American dream continues to endure – rewritten, revived and reinterpreted by the figures shaping our lives and imaginations.
Because ultimately the look of the American dream is no more static than the dream itself.
As Cullen said, it is “most authentically experienced as a struggle to achieve, not a destination”. And it is worn that way, too. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
