$200,000 Head Piece: The Great Gatsby

Lately, with the Gatsby movie coming out, many companies have been using Gatsby as an excuse to help sell there products. One of these companies doing this is Tiffany's. Tiffany's is selling a tiara with many diamonds, which is marketed as Daisy's tiara, for a shocking price. It is being sold for 200,00 dollars! It is really a ridiculous price, and we speculated a little on who would buy such a thing.

You can see the head piece on the Tiffany and Co. website, here.

One of my ideas was that it could potentially be a ploy from Tiffany's to seem even more high and then they already are. When people see that they are selling something that is worth the price of a house, and they see a high class celebrity endorsing it, then they can equate themselves to being high class or being a celebrity if they buy something else from Tiffany's. While another product from Tiffany's might go for a much lower price, it will be equated with the brand that sells a $200,000 piece of jewelry, so it would automatically seem high class.

It is interesting however, that this piece that is being marketed with The Great Gatsby, seems to go against everything the book's message is trying to portray. While the book looks down upon how much our society seems to value class, and how rigid of a class structure there is in America, especially in the east coast, this product seems to encourage a class divide. By someone wearing this, they are clearly advertising that they are high class. I think it is extremely interesting that even a story demoting the class structure can be used to strengthen the class structure.

Why do you think the head piece is so expensive? Also, do you think that the class structure is more or less rigid than it was in the 1920's when The Great Gatsby took place?