Beauty and Style in House of Mirth - Post Eight

In House of Mirth, Edith Wharton obsesses over Lily Bart's beauty and social appearance throughout the course of the novel.  Wharton consistently mentions Lily's clothes, and her desire and need for more.  After reading through Wharton's lavish descriptions of the dinner parties and the extreme amounts of money that Lily spends, I couldn't help but wonder what some of these outfit's looked like.  I started looking at certain photos from the House of Mirth movie and was surprised at how ugly some of Lily's clothes were-here is just a sample:

After looking at some of Lily's hideous outfits from the movie, I then became interested in all the different kinds of fashion during the Gilded Age.  It seems that most of the fashionable outfits at this time focused on bawdiness and extreme frills and lace.  As we saw through Lily, a woman's clothes were representative of her  wealth and social class.  The bigger, the better.  More lace, bigger hats, and fancier dresses only meant more money.  So, as I was browsing through some pictures of these very interesting outfits -example two:

 

 I started to wonder...Has anything really changed since Lily Bart's time in regards to fashion? Sure, most women today would never be caught dead in a corset and large brimmed hat with more feathers than a peacock, however, I think that clothing has always been and still one of the most common and easiest ways of representing wealth.  We define different types of jobs, and the amount of money earned is these professions, to be either a blue or white collar .  Even at Colby, the type of bag you carry around or the certain types of shoes that you have are all displays of certain social standing.  I'm pretty sure we'd never see this guy walking across the quad:

and Colby students most definitely stick out like sore thumbs at the local Waterville Walmart:

Just one of the many preppy outfits seen on Colby's Campus

Yes, this woman actually went to Walmart dressed like this. 

That being said, I am posing this question:  Without wealth, is it impossible to dress "appropriately"  or in a manner than conceals any sort of social class standing?