status seeker

status seeker

Someone who uses conniving, self-serving, or manipulative tactics in order to rise to higher socioeconomic levels. The film has chosen to depict the brilliant young businesswoman as some kind of status seeker who used her friends and connections in order to advance her own career and place in society.
See also: status
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

status seeker

Someone who aspires to a higher socioeconomic level. Upward mobility have always been an aspect of American society, but it took sociologist Vance Packard's 1959 book The Status Seekers to give a name to people who strove to impress by acquiring and flaunting fashionable and expensive items and social cachet. Status seekers—the derogatory epithet quickly gained popularity—not only tried to keep up with the Jones, they wanted to leave the Jones behind.
See also: status
Endangered Phrases by Steven D. Price
See also:
  • depict
  • depict (one) as (something)
  • depict as
  • trump something up
  • trump up
  • trumped up
  • represent (someone or something) as (something)
  • represent as
  • base instinct
  • drown in self-pity
References in periodicals archive
The Status Seeker is competitive and seeks status symbols such as becoming an "Elite Yelper." Along with Communitarians, they tend to post unbiased reviews in their quest to rack up votes for the "most useful" reviews.
They may become a Status Seeker, a Scorned Woman or a Social Nymph.
A true Status Seeker would want the stadium in which the Promise Keepers are hugging each other to be named after him/her.
The Status Seeker: He puts his career before his family.
The good doctor identifies strategies to deal with the whole spectrum of these chore dodgers (and, by default if nothing else, proponents of unequal opportunities), whether they come into the category of boy, worrier, perfectionist or status seeker.
THE STATUS SEEKER He puts his career before his family.
It serves equally the status seeker, out to impress his business clients, and the genuine opera lover for whom the art is everything.
"Some see the growing headphone movement as 'socially alienating' and 'destructive of relationships' and its members as 'status seekers' and 'elitists,'" The New York Times pointed out in 1981.
First, Jesus' critique of the scribes' habits is a call to beware of pretentious status seekers and every advertisement that tells us which product will make us important, loveable or enviable.
120 addresses in 40 countries across the five continents appeals to modern status seekers, who have something special and unique that makes them stand out from the crowd.
He mockingly refers to the emergent black middle class as "black status seekers" in a poem of that title in Jol'iinkomo.
Refugee status seekers may collect necessary documents and obtain refugee status within 6 months.
The research by online travel company Opodo.co.uk, reveals that 45 per cent of us are holiday status seekers and a further 39 per cent experience 'passport stamp envy' - putting us second only to Londoners.
Fashionable to the hilt with an infusion of international celebrities and new millionaires, the region has more recently produced a line of overblown mansions that many consider a social mistake by status seekers.