Customers are flocking to big-discount clothing stores such as Steve and Barry’s, and celebrities are lining up to endorse them. Is it a welcome rejection of materialism and slavery to fashion, or simply making a virtue of limited expectations in relatively tough economic times?

Once upon a time, people prided themselves on being able to afford luxuries. It’s a good thing that such materialistic pride appears to be on the wane—but it’s ironic that it is being replaced by a sense of pride in one’s shopping ability.

The New York Times reports that big-discount clothing stores such as Steve and Barry’s are having great success by keeping expenses low and charging bargain-basement prices:

Steve & Barry’s, for the uninitiated, is to fashion what Tower once was to music. Steve & Barry’s is manna, a store that sells stylish celebrity-branded clothes at prices that are absurdly inexpensive, lower than those at Old Navy, H & M or Forever 21, undercutting even Wal-Mart by as much as half.

The fact is, clothes tend to cost a good deal more than most other fashionable cultural items such as movies, books, music, and the like. The celebrity culture and social pressures, however, always incite people, especially the young, to emulate the styles they see in media presentations, as an easy way of establishing a quickly readable identity for themselves.

Thus the rise of budget-friendly clothing fashions. The owners of Steve and Barry’s have found success by making a virtue of necessity and selling aesthetic beauty on a budget, by keeping expenses to the bare minimum. Whereas most clothing designers charge a huge fortune in licensing fees, the designers stocking Steve and Barry’s stores make their money on volume, as do the stores themselves:

[Steve and Barry’s owners] Mr. Shore and Mr. Prevor, dressed in chinos and rumpled shirts, frequently described the company as “the Google of fashion” and rattled off several ways they had devised to make a high-quality product at the low prices. The clothes appear to be well made — several of the Bitten dresses, made in India, were lined, and the strapless dress Ms. Parker wore is constructed with an internal elastic band to hold it up. And the basketball shoes appear sturdy, although they are made with fake leather (well, so are Stella McCartney’s).

Steve & Barry’s saves big, for example, by opening stores in underperforming malls, where the owners are more likely to negotiate rents and offer other incentives; by building its own bare-bones store displays; by maintaining only a small public relations office in Manhattan; and by manufacturing in countries like China, India, Madagascar and more than 20 others, including the United States.

This is surely no return to the early years of the Christian church or an expression of Buddhist self-denial. It’s simply a smart way for young people to do what they have always done: use every possible means to give themselves a strong and hopefully likeable social identity. The Times story quotes actress Sarah Jessica Parker, whose inexpensive clothing line is sold at Steve and Barry’s as acknowledging that point:

“What has changed,” Ms. Parker said, “is that now people have bragging rights about what they paid. I admired a woman’s pair of pants at a party recently and she said, ‘Fourteen dollars! H & M!’ It really is, among the people I know, part of what they do now.”

Mr. Shore and Mr. Prevor again likened the change to a revolution.

“When you look at clothing now,” Mr. Prevor said, “price is not the arbiter of what is good. It’s the clothes themselves.”

Valuing things on the basis of their real benefits is indeed a good thing, and good fashions do bring aesthetic beauty into the world. That is certainly better than utilitarian drabness, provided it isn’t done wastefully, and that is clearly the point behind the cheap chic—beauty on a budget.