This sounds a little like how the Arts and Crafts Movement (William Morris and crew) would blame 'hideous' prints on technology, when technology wasn't ready to print fabric in so many colors. Actual people were making that fabric the hard way. Technology was involved, in the sense that if you habitually hand down clothes to your servants, you have to be current not to look like a servant. And a way to do that was to pay for the more expensive, conspicuous consumption of other people's lives.