While those living in TriBeCa lofts furnished with reclaimed wood, folk art and flax bed linens might find this paradoxical, marketing theorists do not. Citing previous research on luxury shopping that divides affluent consumers into two groups — “patricians” and “parvenus” — Dr. Nunes and his partners argued that the latter group, ever intent on deriving status through what it buys, remained resistant to the pressures others felt during difficult times to appear restrained in their habits.

While patricians (by which we mean both third-generation occupants of Park Avenue apartments and those who might shop at ABC Carpet) seek an even more quiet tastefulness, parvenus angle to dissociate themselves more obviously from the less-well-off. Some luxury companies, realizing this, begin to focus more aggressively on those unburdened by sensitivities to distress.

Few experiences in New York could have lent this theory greater credence than the peculiar event known as the Luxury Review, which took place at the Metropolitan Pavilion, an event space in Chelsea, on Thursday night. Created by Bradford Rand, who is in the business of putting on job fairs, particularly for the intelligence community, the Luxury Review is a trade show for high-end jewelers, watchmakers, boat builders, automotive dealers and so on who come to market themselves to people who buy expensive things and also to market themselves to one another in the hope of forging various alliances.

Outside the pavilion, a stretch of West 18th Street was given over to two Aston Martins — a 2011 DB9-Volante and a 2012 Vantage S Coupe — and a 34-foot Hacker-Craft runabout, a mahogany boat that took 2,000 production hours and costs $289,000. Midway through the evening, guests were asked to turn their attention to the debut of a Champagne (actually from Champagne) called Billionaires Row.

Inside was a new Bentley, the Silverlake 2012 Bentley Continental GTC convertible, eventually unveiled, and beside it was the president of Bentley Americas, Christophe Georges, who informed me that sales of Bentleys in the United States increased 32 percent last year over sales from 2010. The United States is now the company’s biggest market.

When I asked Mr. Georges to outline in specific terms the profile of his customer base, he explained that the Bentley owner typically has five or six luxury vehicles. These are the kind of wealthy people, he said, “who want to reward themselves for their great achievements.”

The scene at the pavilion begged for broad generalizations about what those achievements might be. One young woman in a lace minidress, orange platform stilettos and a Hermès Kelly bag — a uniform one has not come to associate with Meg Whitman — wandered about aimlessly deflecting male attention. Another woman, Natalia Darialova, 20 or so years older, described herself in quick succession as a fashion designer, a television executive and, as she said some referred to her, “the Oprah of Russia.”

She was there as the guest of Sean Koh, the scion of an entrepreneurial family whose holdings include Manhattan Woods, a golf club in West Nyack, N.Y., that had a booth in the pavilion. If you are the kind of person who might be reluctant to join a club that would have you as a member, then you would presumably ingest your 9-irons, spit them out and repeatedly stab yourself with the prongs of your golf shoes before you would affiliate yourself with one that sought to promote itself at a miniaturized convention at which Ivanka Trump’s jewelry line was also on display. Mr. Koh seemed to realize his predicament, stressing that “we are not here actively seeking membership,” and describing the club as “very exclusive.”

The difference between New York and a place like Los Angeles or Moscow or Chengdu is that we believe patrician tastes dominate here. We believe that a certain ambivalence about money still clings to some fraction of the well-to-do. The city is more virtuous in part because its excesses are less visible. We might walk down Fifth Avenue in the 80s knowing we are walking past some of the most expensive real estate in the world, but because we are not bombarded by a view of gates and fountains and garden attendants, we imagine ourselves in a more sacred place.

And yet, hasn’t this view become ever harder to maintain? On Thursday evening, I met only one person who seemed aggrieved by what surrounded her, Miriam Luan, a former investment banker who divides her time between private-equity work in Manhattan and winemaking in Argentina. “This,” she said, surveying the room, “is not luxury.”

E-mail: bigcity@nytimes.com