In this study, based on extensive anthropological fieldwork throughout the 1990s, this new middle class is examined as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Despite a global orientation and a taste for democracy, its members seemed to have internalized the New Order along with some lingering late-colonial notions as their guidelines for life. How ‘new’ was the new middle class anyway? Lifestyle and material culture practices in the suburb of Bintaro Raya – in public space as well as in the intimacy of living rooms – illustrate the everyday ambiguity of people who appear to be trapped in their imagined middleclassness: they were ‘lost in mall’.