Fabulous home theaters are tucked into the basements of plain suburban houses. Bespoke jeans that start at $1,200 can be detected only by a tiny red logo on the button. The hand-painted Italian bicycles that flash across Silicon Valley on Saturday mornings have become the new Ferrari — and only the cognoscenti could imagine that they cost more than $20,000.

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The two counties that make up Silicon Valley have some of the highest concentrations of wealth in the country, and the share of wealthy households is growing, according to the census. Nearly 14 percent of all households in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties earn more than $200,000 a year, just below the 16 percent of households in Manhattan.

Still, one of the parlor games here is the effort by many to distinguish themselves from the much maligned coterie of bankers and other members of the 1 percent in places like New York and Boston. Wingtips and silk ties are rare. Cycling and kite-boarding are preferred over golf.

Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist in Menlo Park, tells what happened when he began working as a Wall Street analyst in Manhattan in 1993, fresh out of business school. A colleague turned his tie over to check the label. “My first day at work,” Mr. Gurley recalled, “I was told to replace all my ties with Hermès and never to wear brown shoes again.”

He did not heed the advice. Nor did he last long on Wall Street. He is a partner now at Benchmark Capital, which recently profited handsomely from Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram.