I can't even afford to dress poor

.

Is this Poverty Chic?  I see it as paying a substantial premium for clothing that looks like it came from the local Scratch 'N' Sniff factory-seconds store. 

This dressed-up dressing down is only successful, though, when everyone knows you're doing it.   The point is to show solidarity with people who can't eat and buy $500 canvas spads while refusing to live like one .

Absent the press pointing out your faux thriftiness, as opposed to castigating the governor of Alaska for doing the real thing, and without the same press being a weather vane of Obama vanity, the mini-theater to be had of it all would devolve into wondering how a society in the throes of economic alarmism nonetheless finds time and money for such conceit.