That was an understatement; the toys on offer, particularly in recent years, weren’t just “pricey,” they were downright Trumpian. There was the $15,000 mini-Mercedes, gas-powered, with room for two children in its tiny seating area. There was the $30,000 off-road vehicle, designed, Schwarz said, to give kids “their first driving experience.” There was the treehouse that came complete with its own tree ($12,000; “gift wrap,” unfortunately, “not available”). There was the $9,000 “rocking zebra.” There was the customized playhouse called “La Petite Maison,” which had a starting price of $30,000, but rose in price according to its size, its architectural details, and the furnishings deemed fit for it by a “professional children’s interior decorator.”

Toys, sure, have long been fashion items—for parents as much as, and sometimes more than, children. Playthings, objects on display both at home and in public, have long allowed for moms and dads (and also doting friends and relatives) not just to give commercial expression to their love for the kids in their lives, but also to demonstrate to others just how deep that love is. Toys, like most anything else one can purchase from a multi-level emporium on Fifth Avenue, have long been enablers of conspicuous consumption.

Toys have also long had, however, an educational function. Dolls, in particular, have served to model behavior for their young owners, whether that behavior involves parenthood or siblinghood or more general personhood. Barbies, G.I. Joes, Cabbage Patch Kids, Transformers, American Girls, stuffed animals—they teach caring and companionship, all cozily conscribed within a particular, doll-defined set of rules and expectations. Train sets and Legos and K’nexes and all the other manifestations of building blocks do similar work when it comes to modeling the world’s material workings. Toys, of whatever category or brand, ultimately distill the realities of the adult world—physical, commercial, social—into easy, kid-friendly approximations. Into, in other words, games.

F.A.O. Schwarz, with its spate of high-end offerings, simply took all of that Piagetian logic to its logical extreme. “When children are used to living well,” the brand’s 2004 catalog explained, “they should play like this.”

And they should, in the process, the catalog suggested, prepare themselves for the particular obligations that come with privilege—not in the great power/great responsibility kind of way, but in the purely commercial way. Schwarz’s toys were not just toys, but also helpful primers for planned-upon lives of wealth. They were playthings that doubled as performances, instructing the kids who owned them in often unspoken and yet often all-powerful modes of luxurious living. (They should play like this.)