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You wouldn't pay $30 for a can of soup. Or $80 for an undershirt. Yet many of you reading this have paid upward of $300 for jeans. What happened to the Lee Jeans era? In a flash, our price threshold for jeans has increased from $50 to $300. And it's not just jeans that have gone ultra-premium, it's markets as varied as bourbon, workout clothes, and even peanut butter. Could we live in a world seven years from now where "normal" people (including you) would pay $300 for, say, a pair of socks? If so, how would it happen?

Products make the leap from pedestrian to premium when their creators think of them as ideas. Some products are heavy on ideas: perfume, spa treatments, life coaching, alcohol. Others are practically idea-free: mailboxes, fax machines, oil changes. Notice anything about those two sets of goods? You make mega-margins on the first and mini-margins on the second. Margins feed on ideas.

Jeans used to be idea-light. They were workmanlike, durable, casual. But workmanlike doesn't become a $700 million-plus-a-year category within a decade. What ideas does a pair of $300 jeans hold that Lee jeans do not? Let's start with expertise. Paige Adams-Geller founded Paige Premium Denim in 2004. Prior to that, she helped shape the fit for many of the top denim brands, including 7 for All Mankind, which deserves much of the credit for the modern jeans boom. The idea presented to the Paige Premium buyer in a pamphlet on each pair is clear: This person has committed her professional life to finding you the perfect pair of jeans.

As if that weren't enough, meet Jose Auguilar, who works for Paige in Los Angeles. His job is to mess with your jeans. He takes each "finished" pair, and, using a piece of sandpaper, starts scraping away at certain spots on the leg, in order to create the color fade the designers desired. Let's admit that paying extra for this service is a bit like paying $50,000 for a Taurus because Jose Auguilar hit it with a hammer a bunch of times. But without Auguilar, without Adams-Geller, those jeans lose their status as a curated item and become more like Lee. Just jeans.

Part of the underlying reason for consumers being more receptive to this morphing of products into ideas is that our concept of luxury has evolved. Luxury has become more about personal pleasure and self-expression and less about status. In the 1980s, people generally stuck to their social class, says Zain Raj, executive director of the ad agency Euro RSCG, Chicago: "You wore $200 pants with an $80 shirt and a $65 tie. There was a relative order to the world in terms of value. Today, it's all personal." That's why it's not surprising to see people wear $300 jeans with $8 T-shirts. Or to see folks who can barely make rent pay $15 a pound for Costa Rican organic coffee.

Luxury goods are no longer a sign of status; they're the mark of connoisseurship. Go ahead, ask a rich guy about his $3,900 David Yurman watch. "I love watches," he'll say, and he'll probably tell you about the watch's modern Swiss movement, its anti-glare sapphire crystal, and how it's more a work of art than a timepiece. See--he isn't a rich jerk, he's a watch connoisseur! Our world is populated by watch people and wine people and coffee people and jeans people. You are, it seems, what you blow a lot of money on.