UNITED STATES – When you imagine a life of luxury, what comes to mind? A mansion filled with walk-in closets the size of bedrooms? Garages housing sleek vehicles with German and Italian names?

Whatever it is, it is probably not a cordless Dyson vacuum cleaner, mounted in a 550 sq foot studio decorated with nothing but a bed frame.

“I don’t know what I would do without my Dyson,” said Ms Donna Chen, 26, a software engineer who lives under these exact conditions with her boyfriend in Brooklyn. “If I had to choose between saving my bed, my boyfriend and my Dyson in a fire, I’d choose my Dyson V15. Twice.”

While Dyson’s cord-free stick vacuum has been around since 2010, it has only recently become a product that young adults are willing to pay about US$300 (S$400) to US$1,000 for: a compact (slim) and lightweight (2.2kg to 3.6kg) version of the bulky, cumbersome Hoover.

Does that make the vacuum cleaner a status symbol?

In fact, at various times in the United States, the vacuum has served as an expensive item of aspiration and a signal of domestic success – once the housewife’s crowning jewel.

To many Gen Zers and young millennials, for whom traditional markers of stability such as home ownership and early retirement seem largely out of reach, a Dyson cordless vacuum provides a more attainable kind of security.

“If you can’t get a mortgage or a house, you can get a Dyson,” said Ms Caroline Solomon, 35, a cleaning expert who goes by @neat.caroline on TikTok. “It’s one signifier of savviness – a stepping stone towards something bigger.”

When Ms Chen started living alone, her parents promised to buy her a Dyson – which ranked above requests for other similarly priced house-warming gifts such as a furniture set or Wusthof knives.

She said: “I love my Dyson, and I am not ashamed.”

‘Almost weirdly sexy’

New status symbols – Le Creusets, KitchenAids, even full-body magnetic resonance imaging scans – are continually anointed in headlines. But what distinguishes the Dyson as the latest must-have household accessory is not so much what it is as how it is kept.

Whereas vacuum cleaners of the past – and their tangled, serpentine cords – were relegated to the closet, out of sight until the next time they were pulled out, cordless sticks have to be charged and near an outlet.

In other words, the Dyson is not something to hide – it is a silver trophy on display.

Mr Andrew Nguyen, 26, a graduate student in Philadelphia, described his Dyson as “almost weirdly sexy”.

Ms Liz Weech, 25, a software engineer in Brooklyn, loved her former roommate’s device so much that she bought her own and convinced her boyfriend to purchase one too.

But customers and social media influencers say other brands – Shark (US$200 to US$500), Miele (US$600 to US$1,100), Tineco (US$200 to US$800) and Bissell (US$35 to US$400) – are sometimes cheaper and can function just the same, if not better.

Mr Frederick Hissenkaemper, 27, prefers his Miele over the Dyson he inherited from a housemate. “Moving the Dyson around is no fun,” said the Los Angeles marketing manager. “It’s rather stocky, and the suction isn’t even strong enough to get all the dust.”

Whether Dyson is better than its competitors is beside the point, said Mr John McCarthy, 24, an aerospace engineer in Los Angeles who wrote a college admissions essay about the brand. “It’s like the iPhone versus Android debate,” he said. “Have you ever met one of those people that have an Android and won’t shut up about how bad iPhones are?”

Dyson is so ubiquitous in large part because of its marketing, said Mr Scott MacMillan, a 27-year-old mechanical engineer who is the vice-president of the Vacuum Cleaner Collectors Club, which hosts an annual convention for vacuum enthusiasts. “I have every Dyson ad seared into my memory,” he said.

The advertisements often feature the company’s founder, Mr James Dyson, and cite his early career in industrial design. But it is their use of esoteric terms for the vacuum’s features – cyclonic technology, piezoelectric sensor, polycarbonate material – that has especially enticed consumers.

“That technological approach is what refocused a Dyson vacuum cleaner as a technological item rather than something mundane like a coaster,” Mr MacMillan said.

Dysons typically come in royal purple and safety-vest orange: gaudy with a touch of camp, glistening like a Telfar bag.

Ms Eliza McLamb, 22, gave in to Dyson mania after moving into a studio with her two cats and bidding adieu to a two-bedroom apartment with her roommate (and her roommate’s Dyson). “There was litter everywhere all the time,” said the musician and podcaster from Los Angeles. “And I needed the big guns.”

Dyson’s great innovation was going bagless, upending the vacuum market of the time. Those origins may tap something else with today’s young adults: their environmental values.

A relationship saver

Household work – the labour of maintaining a home, caring for children, cooking meals, laundering and folding clothes – has always disproportionately fallen on women. But vacuuming, particularly with a hand-held device accompanied by multiple attachments and settings, seems to blur the gender lines, said Ms Solomon, who also organises couples’ homes.

“Men happen to like vacuuming, insofar as cleaning duties go,” she said.

For Ms Chen, who moved in with her boyfriend, the Dyson has become something of “a relationship saver”. She said: “It has actually enabled me and my boyfriend to really sit down, talk about our boundaries and delegate our chores more evenly, because it’s one of the things he’s willing to do, happily and often.”

Mr Tadashi Adamson, 25, said his Dyson V8 had been “life-changing in a mundane way”. The artist-designer lives with his girlfriend in New York. While chores are “evenly split” between the two, the vacuum “just takes any kind of friction out of cleaning, because it’s already such a difficult thing to do”. NYTIMES