The Diderot Effect
One nice thing makes everything else look like trash. Then you buy your way out of it.
Grounded in the research on Diderot effect (Wikipedia)
The dressing gown that started it
In 1769 Denis Diderot got gifted a fancy scarlet dressing gown. Suddenly his old robe was trash, and so was everything next to it. He swapped his straw chair for an armchair, his desk, his prints, his rug, until his whole study was upgraded and he was broke. He wrote an essay about it: 'Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown.' He said he was a slave to the robe.
Anthropologist names it 200 years later
In 1988 anthropologist Grant McCracken coined the term 'the Diderot effect' in his book Culture and Consumption. His move: goods aren't random. They cluster into a 'Diderot unity' that's internally consistent in style and meaning. Buy one thing outside the cluster and it drags the whole set toward a new, more expensive standard. Consumption is a spiral, not a stop.