I hope this answer is okay for this sub:

The ideas of the economist Thorstein Veblen are relevant here. Veblen's book The Theory of the Leisure Class states that when status comes from wealth, as it does once agriculture is developed, then you need other people to know you're wealthy. You can invite strangers to inspect your storehouses, but it's more practical to prove that you're wealthy by:

A) Showing you have wealth to waste by displaying useless, expensive things, be they beads or gold torques or wigs or fine clothes. Veblen's phrase for this, "conspicuous consumption," is just part of our vocabulary today, and you no doubt can think of a million examples, from McMansions to expensive Apple watches that have exactly the same functions as cheaper ones.

But there's also:

B) Showing that you're wealthy enough to avoid menial labor ("conspicuous leisure"). There are two ways to show this: either display impractical accomplishments that take a long time to acquire (time you couldn't possibly have spent laboring) like being able to tell a wine's year by sipping it, or, more relevant to our point, to show that you're simply unfit for labor (e.g., if you have long hair or long nails) or that you can't possibly have been laboring because your body doesn't show the signs of labor.

A huge wig comes under conspicuous consumption; being pale and fat comes under conspicuous leisure--you can't possibly have been working in the fields if you're pale and fat.

Veblen's point was that while societies may start off celebrating conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure as signs of wealth and status, we wind up finding them esthetically pleasing in themselves.

Since Veblen's time we've seen this happen quite a lot. For instance, aluminum was originally rare and expensive, and it was considered so beautiful that emperors dined off it. Then it turned out that you could make a lot cheaply, and nobody talks about its beauty today.

Or as menial labor moved indoors, paleness and plumpness were replaced as signs of beauty (think how "fair" means both "pale" and "beautiful") by tanness and thinness; today being tan and thin shows that you probably haven't been sitting at a desk.

This can go to ridiculous extremes, to the point that straight-up sickness seems beautiful. In the 19th century, women with tuberculosis were considered because they were so very pale. Today, women with cancer can be complimented on their thinness.

So was being fat and pale with a huge wig peacocking, or was it genuinely attractive? Veblen's point is that there's not much difference: one leads to the other. (Most people think a gold necklace is prettier than the same necklace in silver or bronze, but why?)

(Veblen, however, did believe that we have a natural idea of human beauty--useful, well-proportioned and muscular, while the wealth-based esthetic violated that. That is, we have to be trained to find sickness attractive. To Veblen, that was why fashions changed so often--each fashion was at least a relief from the previous fashion.)