Undine 2.0: From Gilded Age Social Climbers to the Branded Self in Contemporary Influencer Culture

Abstract This article examines Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country through the lens of contemporary influencer culture, highlighting the continuities between Undine Spragg’s pursuit of social visibility and today’s branded digital self. Wharton’s novel posits that beauty, fashion, and marriage can all be placed within the framework of a transactional system allowing for the commodification of femininity that can be circulated as social capital. Drawing on Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption, Roland Barthes’s reflections on fashion, and recent scholarship on authenticity politics, this article argues that Undine prefigures the logics of twenty-first-century influencer culture. Fashion, tabloids, and social rituals in Wharton’s novel mirror the role of platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, where the curated image operates simultaneously as empowerment and constraint. By tracing Undine’s trajectory from provincial outsider to transatlantic socialite, and finally to the branded self par excellence, Wharton manages to produce a critique of the effects of superficiality and mass-media overconsumption. The Custom of the Country endures not only as a satire of social climbing during the Gilded Age but also as a prescient template for understanding the mechanisms of visibility and commodification that continue to structure modern-day influencer economies.