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Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
A sociologist and former fashion model takes readers inside the elite global party circuit of models and bottles to reveal how beautiful young women are used to boost the status of men
Million-dollar birthday parties, mega-yachts on the French Riviera, and $40,000 bottles of champagne. In today's New Gilded Age, the world's moneyed classes have taken conspicuous consumption to new extremes. In Very Important People, sociologist, author, and former fashion model Ashley Mears takes readers inside the exclusive global nightclub and party circuit--from New York City and the Hamptons to Miami and Saint-Tropez--to reveal the intricate economy of beauty, status, and money that lies behind these spectacular displays of wealth and leisure.
Mears spent eighteen months in this world of models and bottles to write this captivating, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking narrative. She describes how clubs and restaurants pay promoters to recruit beautiful young women to their venues in order to attract men and get them to spend huge sums in the ritual of bottle service. These girls enhance the status of the men and enrich club owners, exchanging their bodily capital for as little as free drinks and a chance to party with men who are rich or aspire to be. Though they are priceless assets in the party circuit, these women are regarded as worthless as long-term relationship prospects, and their bodies are constantly assessed against men's money.
A story of extreme gender inequality in a seductive world, Very Important People unveils troubling realities behind moneyed leisure in an age of record economic disparity.
Million-dollar birthday parties, mega-yachts on the French Riviera, and $40,000 bottles of champagne. In today's New Gilded Age, the world's moneyed classes have taken conspicuous consumption to new extremes. In Very Important People, sociologist, author, and former fashion model Ashley Mears takes readers inside the exclusive global nightclub and party circuit--from New York City and the Hamptons to Miami and Saint-Tropez--to reveal the intricate economy of beauty, status, and money that lies behind these spectacular displays of wealth and leisure.
Mears spent eighteen months in this world of models and bottles to write this captivating, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking narrative. She describes how clubs and restaurants pay promoters to recruit beautiful young women to their venues in order to attract men and get them to spend huge sums in the ritual of bottle service. These girls enhance the status of the men and enrich club owners, exchanging their bodily capital for as little as free drinks and a chance to party with men who are rich or aspire to be. Though they are priceless assets in the party circuit, these women are regarded as worthless as long-term relationship prospects, and their bodies are constantly assessed against men's money.
A story of extreme gender inequality in a seductive world, Very Important People unveils troubling realities behind moneyed leisure in an age of record economic disparity.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published May 26, 2020
About the author
Ashley Mears
2 books43 followersAshley Mears is an American writer, sociologist, and former fashion model. She is currently an associate professor of sociology at Boston University. Mears is the author of Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model, and is regularly quoted in media as an academic expert in the culture and economics of fashion.
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July 8, 2020
How do popular clubs fill their capacity with beautiful women and men who will spend outrageous amounts on bottle service and overpriced drinks? This book attempts to answer that question.
What emerges is a somewhat one note but still mostly interesting ethnography on the “high class party scene” and the semi-seedy underbelly associated with it. There’s always a bit of a voyeristic tingle to read about people who spend more money in a night than I make in a year. I definitely felt no small amount of holier-than-thou-ness to learn that my drunken nights were for all intents and purposes more exiting and more fun than spending large amounts of money on champagne and other fancy bottles in high status clubs. Champagne super soakers? That’s the best you got? There wasn’t one description of late night skinny dipping or jumping off railroad bridges. Not one morning described watching the sunrise with a joint on the roof of some building. Frankly, most of the partying described was either appallingly maladroit or outright boring. Status may be nice, but the customs around it sure are stuffy.
The party world is not a small industry. Some of these clubs are multi million dollar businesses involving a complex ecosystem of promoters, club managers, clients, and the modelesque women who seem to pervade the background of this tableau. There is an ever present obsession with models and spending large sums of money at clubs. This book does a good job of explaining and illustrating how exploitative a lot of these systems are for young women. There’s a slight eye roll hearing complaints about free dinners and such, its less now than it would have been at the beginning of the book, but it’s still there. I think a lot of the injustices described in this book fall under the category of “play stupid games win stupid prizes.” The long and short if the authors point is that elite nightlife is an elaborate dick wagging contest among men that uses and oppresses young beautiful women as status symbols.
I did feel that this book was lacking cohesiveness. The writing can’t quite make up its mind. At times it’s very buttoned up for the subject it discusses. Like hearing a zookeeper talk about animal behavior. It’s like, the monkey is not “protecting its territory through ritualistic fecal maneuver” it’s “throwing its shit.” Which makes some sense if you consider the author as a sociologist, but then it will switch over to talking about how some bottle the author saw purchased costs more than the her monthly rent. There’s an inconsistency to the professionalism and tone of the writing that really made it difficult to get into the subject. I recall one passage where the author described this lecherous old man who was inappropriately touching his female dinner guests, the author summates her description of this behavior by stating “I believe he was a large republican donor.” That’s the takeaway? The horror!
I think while the overarching idea and view into a different world is interesting, I found the writing at times made it difficult to get immersed in the book.
What emerges is a somewhat one note but still mostly interesting ethnography on the “high class party scene” and the semi-seedy underbelly associated with it. There’s always a bit of a voyeristic tingle to read about people who spend more money in a night than I make in a year. I definitely felt no small amount of holier-than-thou-ness to learn that my drunken nights were for all intents and purposes more exiting and more fun than spending large amounts of money on champagne and other fancy bottles in high status clubs. Champagne super soakers? That’s the best you got? There wasn’t one description of late night skinny dipping or jumping off railroad bridges. Not one morning described watching the sunrise with a joint on the roof of some building. Frankly, most of the partying described was either appallingly maladroit or outright boring. Status may be nice, but the customs around it sure are stuffy.
The party world is not a small industry. Some of these clubs are multi million dollar businesses involving a complex ecosystem of promoters, club managers, clients, and the modelesque women who seem to pervade the background of this tableau. There is an ever present obsession with models and spending large sums of money at clubs. This book does a good job of explaining and illustrating how exploitative a lot of these systems are for young women. There’s a slight eye roll hearing complaints about free dinners and such, its less now than it would have been at the beginning of the book, but it’s still there. I think a lot of the injustices described in this book fall under the category of “play stupid games win stupid prizes.” The long and short if the authors point is that elite nightlife is an elaborate dick wagging contest among men that uses and oppresses young beautiful women as status symbols.
I did feel that this book was lacking cohesiveness. The writing can’t quite make up its mind. At times it’s very buttoned up for the subject it discusses. Like hearing a zookeeper talk about animal behavior. It’s like, the monkey is not “protecting its territory through ritualistic fecal maneuver” it’s “throwing its shit.” Which makes some sense if you consider the author as a sociologist, but then it will switch over to talking about how some bottle the author saw purchased costs more than the her monthly rent. There’s an inconsistency to the professionalism and tone of the writing that really made it difficult to get into the subject. I recall one passage where the author described this lecherous old man who was inappropriately touching his female dinner guests, the author summates her description of this behavior by stating “I believe he was a large republican donor.” That’s the takeaway? The horror!
I think while the overarching idea and view into a different world is interesting, I found the writing at times made it difficult to get immersed in the book.
June 8, 2020
"Free things are a clear marker of status in the VIP world. Free entry, drinks, and dinners signal recognition of a person’s social worth. “I always said, in nightlife it’s not what you spend, it’s what you get for free. That’s real power,” said Malcolm, the promoter I followed in New York and Miami. “You got a lot of money and you spend a lot, of course you get respect. But if you don’t spend a dime, that’s power.”"
July 5, 2020
This is a sociology research project about promoters, models and prostitution. The author shadowed some promoters almost a decade ago in order to analyze gender stereotypes among other concepts. That is sort a fatal flaw -all her conclusions now belong to a world that has drastically changed: besides social media, the #metoo movement exploted and the Epstein case became known.
She does a good job of observing interactions among the willing participants and how they try to cover up what they are actually doing, but one of the main issues about this text is that it needs to be edited heavily: the author constantly repeats the same conclusions over and over to the point you feel like screaming: I GOT IT GIRL, NOW MOVE ON!
I would've also focused on one or two people instead of rambling about the 50 she investigated because it would've make us feel involved to them. They are described in a very one-dimensional way which may work in a thesis but not so much in a story. As well, the author said that in order to do this research she became a "girl" and lived like them for 18 months. However, her voice seems really detached from what she's writing.
Overall, it has a lot of interesting information but it belongs a lot more to a sociology journal than a library bookshelf.
She does a good job of observing interactions among the willing participants and how they try to cover up what they are actually doing, but one of the main issues about this text is that it needs to be edited heavily: the author constantly repeats the same conclusions over and over to the point you feel like screaming: I GOT IT GIRL, NOW MOVE ON!
I would've also focused on one or two people instead of rambling about the 50 she investigated because it would've make us feel involved to them. They are described in a very one-dimensional way which may work in a thesis but not so much in a story. As well, the author said that in order to do this research she became a "girl" and lived like them for 18 months. However, her voice seems really detached from what she's writing.
Overall, it has a lot of interesting information but it belongs a lot more to a sociology journal than a library bookshelf.
June 20, 2020
Социологически анализ на стойността на красотата в икономиката на много богатите хора. Основният фокус е върху елитни клубове и дискотеки в Ню Йорк, Сен Тропе, Кан и други престижни дестинации.
Богатите мъже търсят статус и мимолетни удоволствия, което често се случва в компанията на млади и красиви жени. Управителите на скъпите клубове разбират това и организират сложна система за създаване на контакти между богатите мъже и красивите жени, в която основно място заема закупуването на бутилки алкохол с огромна надценка. За да набавят жени, клубовете наемат "промоутъри", които да ги доведат вътре, обещавайки им безплатен вход и консумация, които иначе не могат да си позволят. Така престижът на заведението се вдига от количеството и качеството на двете основни единици в икономиката на богатите и известните - платежоспособни мъже и млади жен��.
Книгата описва жестоката дарвинистка логика на VIP икономиката. Вече не всеки може да посещава елитни дискотеки. Хората, които не отговарят на изисквания, биват спирани на входа и грубо отпращани - жени, които не са достатъчно красиви, високи или слаби, както и мъже, които не могат да си позволят голяма сметка в заведението. Понякога отпращането е грубо и агресивно. Конкуренцията за достъп до елитните места е безмилостно жестока. Интересно е, че не винаги основната мотивация е сексуална. За много от участниците водещ е статуса, а именно да бъдеш видян в компанията на правилните хора, до които малцина имат достъп.
Приоритетите на участниците във VIP икономиката се различават твъде много. Клубовете искат приходи от консумация на скъп алкохол. За това трябва да привлекат млади и красиви жени, които искат купонджийски живот, заплатен от някой друг. Промоутърите откриват и довеждат жените, за да бъдат допуснати самите те в клубовете с богатите хора, смятайки че близостта им с тях ще им даде нови бизнес партньорства и възможности за професионално израстване. Богатите мъже пък искат да бъдат видени в компанията на голям брой красиви жени, което красноречиво говори за социален статус.
Прочитайки книгата се замислих колко по-егалитарно настроени сме тук. Не се сещам за места, които не могат да бъдат лесно достъпни за почти всеки. Или може би не се виждат лесно. В САЩ и другите богати страни икономиката на консуматорско харчене за статус, красота и бизнес възможности е много показна и никой не намира това за странно. Оцеляването в икономиката на богатите не е лесно. Социалната динамика е прекалено сложна за повечето участници, които не успяват да се задържат дълго в играта.
Богатите мъже търсят статус и мимолетни удоволствия, което често се случва в компанията на млади и красиви жени. Управителите на скъпите клубове разбират това и организират сложна система за създаване на контакти между богатите мъже и красивите жени, в която основно място заема закупуването на бутилки алкохол с огромна надценка. За да набавят жени, клубовете наемат "промоутъри", които да ги доведат вътре, обещавайки им безплатен вход и консумация, които иначе не могат да си позволят. Така престижът на заведението се вдига от количеството и качеството на двете основни единици в икономиката на богатите и известните - платежоспособни мъже и млади жен��.
Книгата описва жестоката дарвинистка логика на VIP икономиката. Вече не всеки може да посещава елитни дискотеки. Хората, които не отговарят на изисквания, биват спирани на входа и грубо отпращани - жени, които не са достатъчно красиви, високи или слаби, както и мъже, които не могат да си позволят голяма сметка в заведението. Понякога отпращането е грубо и агресивно. Конкуренцията за достъп до елитните места е безмилостно жестока. Интересно е, че не винаги основната мотивация е сексуална. За много от участниците водещ е статуса, а именно да бъдеш видян в компанията на правилните хора, до които малцина имат достъп.
Приоритетите на участниците във VIP икономиката се различават твъде много. Клубовете искат приходи от консумация на скъп алкохол. За това трябва да привлекат млади и красиви жени, които искат купонджийски живот, заплатен от някой друг. Промоутърите откриват и довеждат жените, за да бъдат допуснати самите те в клубовете с богатите хора, смятайки че близостта им с тях ще им даде нови бизнес партньорства и възможности за професионално израстване. Богатите мъже пък искат да бъдат видени в компанията на голям брой красиви жени, което красноречиво говори за социален статус.
Прочитайки книгата се замислих колко по-егалитарно настроени сме тук. Не се сещам за места, които не могат да бъдат лесно достъпни за почти всеки. Или може би не се виждат лесно. В САЩ и другите богати страни икономиката на консуматорско харчене за статус, красота и бизнес възможности е много показна и никой не намира това за странно. Оцеляването в икономиката на богатите не е лесно. Социалната динамика е прекалено сложна за повечето участници, които не успяват да се задържат дълго в играта.
September 16, 2023
Here is a description of a trendy nightclub (in New York or Los Angeles, say) from someone who has never been in a trendy nightclub:
Outside the door, a line of 30 people waiting to get in. Inside, a dance floor swept by strobe lights, and a bar where the sweaty hoi polloi jostle one another for the chance to buy $20 whiskey sours having already paid an exorbitant entrance fee. The clubs make money off these entrance fees and overpriced drinks. But just barely. The true economic engine driving the global party circuit is table service. This is where things get lucrative. Rather than waiting in line behind the velvet rope, you and your posse are whisked through the front door to a reserved table. Separated from the dance floor, yet conspicuously visible, you fraternize in relative comfort with celebrities, businessmen, and models. Drinks are brought directly to your table; no need to elbow the plebeians aside and wait five minutes for the bartender to catch your eye. The privilege of table service comes with a steep price tag, however, typically a $1000 to $2000 minimum spend for the night. A bottle of Grey Goose vodka, which retails for about $35, magically transforms into a $500 bottle within the confines of a nightclub, a mark up of several thousand percent. Some luxury bottles of champagne cost $10,000. Some tables spend six figures in a single night.
It's pricey. But, if you're a newly minted tech millionaire or a Saudi oil tycoon, you want to party. You want a bottle of champagne worth more than the average US mortgage payment, and you want to drink it surrounded by hot chicks, and you want everyone to see you doing it, whether from the dance floor, or on Instagram.
This book explores the world of elite nightclubs and the 'very important people' who frequent them. It's a work of sociology, a legitimate academic text by a professor at Boston University who was once a model herself. As an academic text, it can get a tad stuffy and theoretical at times, with discussions of 'bodily capital' and 'sublimated hierarchical dynamics' and flashbacks to the sexual moral panic unleashed by the industrial revolution in Victorian England. But most of the book reads like a travel diary. If you want to know what it's like to party in a swank nightclub, you'll find out. More importantly, you'll find out what it's like for the models, the 'bottle clients', and the promoters who live in this world.
Before reading this book, I had no idea that the career of 'promoter' even existed, at least in the nightclub sense. In this context, a promoter is someone (nearly always a man) who brings supermodels to clubs.
On any given night, at any given nightclub, about a quarter of the VIP tables are reserved for promoters and their bevy of 'girls', as they're known in the biz. Neither the girls nor the promoters pays for the tables. The club lets them in for free, because the presence of hot chicks attracts rich dudes who then spend thousands of dollars on the remaining tables to party with hot chicks. That's the business model. The promoters do alright in this equation. The club usually cuts them a percentage of the bar tab, or pays them directly for the number of girls brought in, and a promoter can easily make $500 to $1000 a night, perhaps more depending on the largess of the clients or the quality of girls.
The girls are paid nothing. The book spends many pages emphasizing the fact that the girls' presence—which drives the entire industry—essentially amounts to unpaid labor, and asking what exactly the girls are getting out of the deal. Short answer: free food, drinks, fun, sometimes sex, and the chance to meet rich dudes, who secretly look down on them as frivolous and dumb.
The clubs ruthlessly police the 'quality' of the girls. They want only the rich and beautiful inside. It's transparently and unapologetically shallow. Girls must be young, tall, and pretty. They must wear high heels and skimpy dresses. Bouncers are not shy about denying entrance to girls who are too short, too heavy, or dressed wrong. They are downright mean about it, in fact. Imagine trying to get into a club and the bouncer tells you, "Not you fatso." Or "This place isn't for the elderly." To your face.
I personally find this cruel and inhumane. But, as the book explains, this exclusivity is exactly what drives the clubs' elite status. "If we let people like you inside, you wouldn't want to come here," says one bouncer. This exclusivity is part of the appeal for the unpaid models. It's validation. Simply getting through the door proves they are pretty enough, and thin enough, to party with the cool kids.
Here's a story: my wife and I went to visit a friend in Miami. One night, we went out in a group of about eight people, a mix of men and women, all in our late 30s or early 40s. We tried to get into a nightclub that was on the top floor of a luxury hotel, one of the most trendy nightclubs in Miami. There was a line of Lamborghinis and Teslas and limos at the entrance. We got as far as the velvet rope in front of the elevator to the club when the bouncer quickly pulled the rope across the entrance to the elevator, holding up his hand to stop us. He got on his walkie talkie and discussed something with a supervisor. Finally he looked at us and said, "Okay, we'll let you in but it will be $60 a head." We balked. At that EXACT MOMENT, a group of young women in their early 20s, probably models, all wearing short skirts and heels, came up behind us. The bouncer simply pulled aside the rope and let them into the elevator without charging them.
We left in a huff. I, personally, found the entire experience hilarious. LOOK AT US! WE'RE SO OLD AND UGLY! But several of the women in our group were legitimately pissed. I mean, I think I was 36 or 37 years old, and it was the first time I really FELT my age, you know? Like, I am no longer young. Thank you for reminding me, bouncer.
I find it curious that many of the things we sapiens do to acquire (and signal) status so often involve discomfort. High heeled shoes are uncomfortable. Three hours in a club where the 110 db bass reverberations make conversation impossible are uncomfortable. A Lamborghini is uncomfortable. A $500 bottle of Grey Goose is uncomfortable. Worrying about how pretty or rich you are is uncomfortable.
One might ask, why? The answer: status. People want to feel special.
So we live in a world where the top 1% owns the bottom 50% of wealth, and defenders of the status quo cite “work ethic” and “meritocracy” as the source of this “inevitability,” but sometimes I look at my species and the dumb things we spend money on while the world burns and wonder if perhaps it would have been better if bipedal apes had never evolved on the Serengeti in the first place. The Big Bang created time and matter, heavy elements were forged in the hearts of dying stars, space dust coalesced into planet Earth, and millions of years of evolution produced a species that spends $500 on a $35 bottle of vodka while Drake blasts at 100 dB . . . because we want to look cool.
Outside the door, a line of 30 people waiting to get in. Inside, a dance floor swept by strobe lights, and a bar where the sweaty hoi polloi jostle one another for the chance to buy $20 whiskey sours having already paid an exorbitant entrance fee. The clubs make money off these entrance fees and overpriced drinks. But just barely. The true economic engine driving the global party circuit is table service. This is where things get lucrative. Rather than waiting in line behind the velvet rope, you and your posse are whisked through the front door to a reserved table. Separated from the dance floor, yet conspicuously visible, you fraternize in relative comfort with celebrities, businessmen, and models. Drinks are brought directly to your table; no need to elbow the plebeians aside and wait five minutes for the bartender to catch your eye. The privilege of table service comes with a steep price tag, however, typically a $1000 to $2000 minimum spend for the night. A bottle of Grey Goose vodka, which retails for about $35, magically transforms into a $500 bottle within the confines of a nightclub, a mark up of several thousand percent. Some luxury bottles of champagne cost $10,000. Some tables spend six figures in a single night.
It's pricey. But, if you're a newly minted tech millionaire or a Saudi oil tycoon, you want to party. You want a bottle of champagne worth more than the average US mortgage payment, and you want to drink it surrounded by hot chicks, and you want everyone to see you doing it, whether from the dance floor, or on Instagram.
This book explores the world of elite nightclubs and the 'very important people' who frequent them. It's a work of sociology, a legitimate academic text by a professor at Boston University who was once a model herself. As an academic text, it can get a tad stuffy and theoretical at times, with discussions of 'bodily capital' and 'sublimated hierarchical dynamics' and flashbacks to the sexual moral panic unleashed by the industrial revolution in Victorian England. But most of the book reads like a travel diary. If you want to know what it's like to party in a swank nightclub, you'll find out. More importantly, you'll find out what it's like for the models, the 'bottle clients', and the promoters who live in this world.
Before reading this book, I had no idea that the career of 'promoter' even existed, at least in the nightclub sense. In this context, a promoter is someone (nearly always a man) who brings supermodels to clubs.
On any given night, at any given nightclub, about a quarter of the VIP tables are reserved for promoters and their bevy of 'girls', as they're known in the biz. Neither the girls nor the promoters pays for the tables. The club lets them in for free, because the presence of hot chicks attracts rich dudes who then spend thousands of dollars on the remaining tables to party with hot chicks. That's the business model. The promoters do alright in this equation. The club usually cuts them a percentage of the bar tab, or pays them directly for the number of girls brought in, and a promoter can easily make $500 to $1000 a night, perhaps more depending on the largess of the clients or the quality of girls.
The girls are paid nothing. The book spends many pages emphasizing the fact that the girls' presence—which drives the entire industry—essentially amounts to unpaid labor, and asking what exactly the girls are getting out of the deal. Short answer: free food, drinks, fun, sometimes sex, and the chance to meet rich dudes, who secretly look down on them as frivolous and dumb.
The clubs ruthlessly police the 'quality' of the girls. They want only the rich and beautiful inside. It's transparently and unapologetically shallow. Girls must be young, tall, and pretty. They must wear high heels and skimpy dresses. Bouncers are not shy about denying entrance to girls who are too short, too heavy, or dressed wrong. They are downright mean about it, in fact. Imagine trying to get into a club and the bouncer tells you, "Not you fatso." Or "This place isn't for the elderly." To your face.
I personally find this cruel and inhumane. But, as the book explains, this exclusivity is exactly what drives the clubs' elite status. "If we let people like you inside, you wouldn't want to come here," says one bouncer. This exclusivity is part of the appeal for the unpaid models. It's validation. Simply getting through the door proves they are pretty enough, and thin enough, to party with the cool kids.
Here's a story: my wife and I went to visit a friend in Miami. One night, we went out in a group of about eight people, a mix of men and women, all in our late 30s or early 40s. We tried to get into a nightclub that was on the top floor of a luxury hotel, one of the most trendy nightclubs in Miami. There was a line of Lamborghinis and Teslas and limos at the entrance. We got as far as the velvet rope in front of the elevator to the club when the bouncer quickly pulled the rope across the entrance to the elevator, holding up his hand to stop us. He got on his walkie talkie and discussed something with a supervisor. Finally he looked at us and said, "Okay, we'll let you in but it will be $60 a head." We balked. At that EXACT MOMENT, a group of young women in their early 20s, probably models, all wearing short skirts and heels, came up behind us. The bouncer simply pulled aside the rope and let them into the elevator without charging them.
We left in a huff. I, personally, found the entire experience hilarious. LOOK AT US! WE'RE SO OLD AND UGLY! But several of the women in our group were legitimately pissed. I mean, I think I was 36 or 37 years old, and it was the first time I really FELT my age, you know? Like, I am no longer young. Thank you for reminding me, bouncer.
I find it curious that many of the things we sapiens do to acquire (and signal) status so often involve discomfort. High heeled shoes are uncomfortable. Three hours in a club where the 110 db bass reverberations make conversation impossible are uncomfortable. A Lamborghini is uncomfortable. A $500 bottle of Grey Goose is uncomfortable. Worrying about how pretty or rich you are is uncomfortable.
One might ask, why? The answer: status. People want to feel special.
So we live in a world where the top 1% owns the bottom 50% of wealth, and defenders of the status quo cite “work ethic” and “meritocracy” as the source of this “inevitability,” but sometimes I look at my species and the dumb things we spend money on while the world burns and wonder if perhaps it would have been better if bipedal apes had never evolved on the Serengeti in the first place. The Big Bang created time and matter, heavy elements were forged in the hearts of dying stars, space dust coalesced into planet Earth, and millions of years of evolution produced a species that spends $500 on a $35 bottle of vodka while Drake blasts at 100 dB . . . because we want to look cool.
October 31, 2021
在公司附近的一間運動酒吧，每週有一天是Lady's Night: 女性當晚入場可獲得免費的酒。我本來以為是因為運動酒吧通常都是男人群聚，店家為了吸引新客源(女性)而做出的促銷活動，沒想到原來簡單一杯免費的酒，跟夜店文化營運模式緊緊相關......"當女孩成為貨幣"這本書中的主角其實不只是女孩，而是堆砌了夜店五光十色的背後，市井小民們的勞動成果，包含高高在上的模特兒、以量取勝大量平民女孩們、還有"成也女孩敗也女孩"的酒店公關、被當成冤大頭的傻傻中產階級酒客，以及虛無飄渺的真正有錢人。
在這個明明就是被金錢拱出來，但人人都避談金錢，包裝成"友誼、玩樂以及免費晚餐"的微妙世界，作者用淡淡地筆調的剖析了所有勞動人口的矛盾心理。一個手機裡面存了兩三千筆女孩電話的公關，為了讓女孩廝混到半夜三點替夜店撐場面，從白天就要付出各種努力: 帶大家出去看電影玩樂、甚至幫忙搬家、隨傳隨到。而初來紐約夢想當模特兒的窮困女孩們，為了一頓免費的晚餐或是在市區的住宿，形成了和公關互相依存的關係。
作者覺得女孩的報酬和公關獲得的利益並不對等(畢竟一個公關一晚可以得到500~1000美金的夜店酒水抽成，而女孩只得到一頓吃喝玩樂)，但老實說，雖說"年輕貌美"是個資本，但光靠這個好像能獲取的也就是那些而已啊，不然就真的變成賣淫/飯局妹了.....只是當大家離開了夜店，倒是不約而同地覺得，在夜店裏面混的(無論是女孩還是公關)都不是甚麼好的交往對象，真是非常的諷刺。
本來是湊kobo 555隨手買下的一本書，出乎意料的有趣~
在這個明明就是被金錢拱出來，但人人都避談金錢，包裝成"友誼、玩樂以及免費晚餐"的微妙世界，作者用淡淡地筆調的剖析了所有勞動人口的矛盾心理。一個手機裡面存了兩三千筆女孩電話的公關，為了讓女孩廝混到半夜三點替夜店撐場面，從白天就要付出各種努力: 帶大家出去看電影玩樂、甚至幫忙搬家、隨傳隨到。而初來紐約夢想當模特兒的窮困女孩們，為了一頓免費的晚餐或是在市區的住宿，形成了和公關互相依存的關係。
作者覺得女孩的報酬和公關獲得的利益並不對等(畢竟一個公關一晚可以得到500~1000美金的夜店酒水抽成，而女孩只得到一頓吃喝玩樂)，但老實說，雖說"年輕貌美"是個資本，但光靠這個好像能獲取的也就是那些而已啊，不然就真的變成賣淫/飯局妹了.....只是當大家離開了夜店，倒是不約而同地覺得，在夜店裏面混的(無論是女孩還是公關)都不是甚麼好的交往對象，真是非常的諷刺。
本來是湊kobo 555隨手買下的一本書，出乎意料的有趣~
July 3, 2020
First things first, I am exceptionally glad somebody is writing about this. Nightlife might seem like a niche arena, but really we're talking about at best extremely gendered and at worst highly misogynistic and exploitative attitudes and practices amongst some of the world's most powerful men (yes, almost exclusively men) -- which obviously are not just confined to nightclubs, even if they're more apparent in that environment. This won't surprise anyone who's stepped foot into one of these types of nightclubs (the kind I now make an effort to stay away from, for this very reason!). What absolutely shocked me, however, was the extent of what goes on behind the scenes to create this environment. Not only does this work verge on sex trafficking, but the glamour and false illusions of the whole scene manage to lure girls willingly into these exploitative arrangements. File this one under building a better world for our children: systems we should all understand and seek to dismantle.
Getting off my soapbox, however, the book is not without its flaws. Clearly a lot of work went into the research and editing, with the author taking her ideas to various conferences to discuss and refine her findings and arguments. That said, like someone on here mentioned -- it reads like a first draft, with various bits of information weirdly repeated throughout as if they hadn't been presented previously. The book also drags on longer than it needs to, which with a book like this which eats away at your soul a bit with each page just due to the upsetting nature of the content, is perhaps less than desirable. I think it could be better with another edit, but I absolutely believe it was a worthwhile read and would recommend it.
Getting off my soapbox, however, the book is not without its flaws. Clearly a lot of work went into the research and editing, with the author taking her ideas to various conferences to discuss and refine her findings and arguments. That said, like someone on here mentioned -- it reads like a first draft, with various bits of information weirdly repeated throughout as if they hadn't been presented previously. The book also drags on longer than it needs to, which with a book like this which eats away at your soul a bit with each page just due to the upsetting nature of the content, is perhaps less than desirable. I think it could be better with another edit, but I absolutely believe it was a worthwhile read and would recommend it.
June 3, 2020
I've never gone clubbing (nor had much desire to do so, despite a predilection for EDM).
Nonetheless this book was an utterly gripping (and devastating) ethnographic/economic analysis of the world of models, bottles, promoters, clients, whales, and clubs. Clear, direct prose hauntingly illustrates the gender-based inequities of power that persist in our world and are brought under a glaring flashlight in the club.
Nonetheless this book was an utterly gripping (and devastating) ethnographic/economic analysis of the world of models, bottles, promoters, clients, whales, and clubs. Clear, direct prose hauntingly illustrates the gender-based inequities of power that persist in our world and are brought under a glaring flashlight in the club.
Read
January 26, 2021I've been in a club VIP section with bottle service twice, both times in London. In 2012, I was invited by a friend who worked for the British government who had hosted an economic development event that Dr. Dre attended, and my friend got invited to a club where Dre would be hanging out. We sat on a red leather booth screened off from the main dance area and poured ourselves drinks from a cart of booze full of Courvoisier and Grey Goose, etc. Dr. Dre eventually showed up and sat about 10 feet away and people took selfies with him. It was fun but awkward.
In 2019 we ended up in some packed club in Mayfair that some people we made friends with while having dinner at the Hawksmoor after my wife sent them champagne got us in. It was total chaos inside. I stood next to huge pile of fur coats and poured drinks from a handle of vodka in an ice bucket while people bumped into me and screamed into my ear trying to make conversation over the DJ blasting EDM. I almost got in a fight with two guys pushing their way into the VIP section and totally embarrassed myself because they turned out to be the people who had agreed to let us in! My wife ended up leaving her coat there and I had to go back the next morning and talk my way in past very skeptical security to get it from the lost and found. The space looked pathetic when it wasn't packed full of dancing people, strobe lights, etc., in the winter morning light.
So I think I prefer to read about the club scene rather than experience it again first hand.
In 2019 we ended up in some packed club in Mayfair that some people we made friends with while having dinner at the Hawksmoor after my wife sent them champagne got us in. It was total chaos inside. I stood next to huge pile of fur coats and poured drinks from a handle of vodka in an ice bucket while people bumped into me and screamed into my ear trying to make conversation over the DJ blasting EDM. I almost got in a fight with two guys pushing their way into the VIP section and totally embarrassed myself because they turned out to be the people who had agreed to let us in! My wife ended up leaving her coat there and I had to go back the next morning and talk my way in past very skeptical security to get it from the lost and found. The space looked pathetic when it wasn't packed full of dancing people, strobe lights, etc., in the winter morning light.
So I think I prefer to read about the club scene rather than experience it again first hand.
August 16, 2020
This book is a must-read if you want to understand status, power, women’s emotional labor, how economic classes work in the United States, and, just importantly, because it’s a super interesting topic. Also, now I want some champagne.
January 3, 2021
I made a comment on reddit several years ago where I basically lamented that whatever power women supposedly get for being attractive is at odds with the general societal belief that women should not, under almost all circumstances, actually use that power for their own benefit, and society will punish women in various ways if they try to do so. This book is like the long-form version of that comment under the setting of the global party circuit.
"The phrase 'sex sells' is a deceptively simple way of alluding to the historically entrenched ways that femininity can stoke desire for commodities, turning the female form into an indispensable tool of capitalism. The phrase assume that women, not men, are the sex available for sale. With the rise of commodity capitalism and its marketing via visual culture, women took on a quality that film critic Laura Mulvey famously described as 'to-be-looked-at-ness.' Women became objects before a male gaze, not unlike the expanding array of consumer goods displayed in bourgeoning promenades and department stores. When 'shopgirls' appeared selling merchandise in department stores in late Victorian England, they raised a titillating ambiguity before the male gaze: Was she, perhaps, also for sale? With shopgirls, department stores could harness what historian Peter Bailey termed, in his history of Victorian sexual culture, parasexuality. Writing about bar maidens, Bailey conceptualized parasexuality as feminine sexuality that is 'deployed but not fully released.' Parasexuality drives contemporary entertainment and service industries, with sales floors designed to harness men's attention with sex even when the goods and services are far removed from sex: 'gallerinas' in art galleries, 'booth babes' at tech conferences, flight attendants on airplanes, hotel concierges, even office secretaries. Entertainment, retail and hospitality industries tap into the value of girls all around the world."
"Models, chorus girls, flappers, and shopgirls all publicly displayed their bodies for profit. They were young and beautiful, and praise-worthy for it, but they also tainted their reputations by showing their bodies in public. People both admired and despised them. A predatory man could assume their sexual availability, as the sort of girls who were 'ripe for seduction but not for marriage'...While valuable in clubs, party girls were spoken of with deep disdain by the men I interviewed. They talked about them as brainless, empty vessels who were uncultured, sexually loose, and, it sometimes seemed, worthless as humans through priceless as image."
"To Wade, the worst girls were the ones who don't care when their photographs get shared between men. That's how denigrated the party girl is, that someone like Wade assumes she doesn't mind when men disrespect her."
"While the VIP club space extracted value from women's beauty, women suspected of using their looks for their own economic gain were shunned."
"Beauty, many people believe, can function as a form of capital for women, something women can trade for upward mobility. Perhaps, some argue, beauty is women's special power to subvert traditional hierarchies...The notion of beauty as women's 'erotic capital' is popular but thinly supported by data. Hypergamy, or 'marrying up', might look like a way in which women can use their erotic capital, but most of the research on assortative mating shows that homogamy is actually more common, and, since the 1980s, men are increasingly marrying women with similar education and income...Sexuality has always had asymmetrical consequences for men and women. Men gain status and respect with their sexual conquests, while promiscuity ruins a woman's respectability. Girls may have abundant riches in the form of bodily capital, but their capacity to spend it is limited by gendered rules of sexual conduct."
"Being on the receiving end of a wealthy and powerful male gaze could feel thrilling and seductive, especially as the VIP men's gaze produces status distinctions among women. One powerful pull for women to join the VIP scene is precisely the knowledge that other women are not allowed in. Part of the fun is getting to join a world that excludes and devalues others. Women thus strike a patriarchal bargain by gaining access in exchange for their own subordination as girls in the VIP world...In a supposedly post-feminist world, equality is talked about as a matter of individual rights and access. But empowerment is never an individual project, and the pleasures that empower girls as objects of men's desire produce hierarchies among women who are ranked in a value system according to men's perceptions of their worth. For every woman empowered to embrace the privilege of her beauty, there are many more who are marked as devalued, and inequalities grow, both among women and 'girls', and between women and men. Those girls deemed pretty enough to be at the center of the most exclusive parties in the world were still outsiders, always adjacent to the real power concentrated in men's hands."
"While claiming to seek egalitarian terms of friendship, without instrumentality, he could profit handsomely from his girls, only to deride them for being inauthentic users when they demanded something in return."
"The phrase 'sex sells' is a deceptively simple way of alluding to the historically entrenched ways that femininity can stoke desire for commodities, turning the female form into an indispensable tool of capitalism. The phrase assume that women, not men, are the sex available for sale. With the rise of commodity capitalism and its marketing via visual culture, women took on a quality that film critic Laura Mulvey famously described as 'to-be-looked-at-ness.' Women became objects before a male gaze, not unlike the expanding array of consumer goods displayed in bourgeoning promenades and department stores. When 'shopgirls' appeared selling merchandise in department stores in late Victorian England, they raised a titillating ambiguity before the male gaze: Was she, perhaps, also for sale? With shopgirls, department stores could harness what historian Peter Bailey termed, in his history of Victorian sexual culture, parasexuality. Writing about bar maidens, Bailey conceptualized parasexuality as feminine sexuality that is 'deployed but not fully released.' Parasexuality drives contemporary entertainment and service industries, with sales floors designed to harness men's attention with sex even when the goods and services are far removed from sex: 'gallerinas' in art galleries, 'booth babes' at tech conferences, flight attendants on airplanes, hotel concierges, even office secretaries. Entertainment, retail and hospitality industries tap into the value of girls all around the world."
"Models, chorus girls, flappers, and shopgirls all publicly displayed their bodies for profit. They were young and beautiful, and praise-worthy for it, but they also tainted their reputations by showing their bodies in public. People both admired and despised them. A predatory man could assume their sexual availability, as the sort of girls who were 'ripe for seduction but not for marriage'...While valuable in clubs, party girls were spoken of with deep disdain by the men I interviewed. They talked about them as brainless, empty vessels who were uncultured, sexually loose, and, it sometimes seemed, worthless as humans through priceless as image."
"To Wade, the worst girls were the ones who don't care when their photographs get shared between men. That's how denigrated the party girl is, that someone like Wade assumes she doesn't mind when men disrespect her."
"While the VIP club space extracted value from women's beauty, women suspected of using their looks for their own economic gain were shunned."
"Beauty, many people believe, can function as a form of capital for women, something women can trade for upward mobility. Perhaps, some argue, beauty is women's special power to subvert traditional hierarchies...The notion of beauty as women's 'erotic capital' is popular but thinly supported by data. Hypergamy, or 'marrying up', might look like a way in which women can use their erotic capital, but most of the research on assortative mating shows that homogamy is actually more common, and, since the 1980s, men are increasingly marrying women with similar education and income...Sexuality has always had asymmetrical consequences for men and women. Men gain status and respect with their sexual conquests, while promiscuity ruins a woman's respectability. Girls may have abundant riches in the form of bodily capital, but their capacity to spend it is limited by gendered rules of sexual conduct."
"Being on the receiving end of a wealthy and powerful male gaze could feel thrilling and seductive, especially as the VIP men's gaze produces status distinctions among women. One powerful pull for women to join the VIP scene is precisely the knowledge that other women are not allowed in. Part of the fun is getting to join a world that excludes and devalues others. Women thus strike a patriarchal bargain by gaining access in exchange for their own subordination as girls in the VIP world...In a supposedly post-feminist world, equality is talked about as a matter of individual rights and access. But empowerment is never an individual project, and the pleasures that empower girls as objects of men's desire produce hierarchies among women who are ranked in a value system according to men's perceptions of their worth. For every woman empowered to embrace the privilege of her beauty, there are many more who are marked as devalued, and inequalities grow, both among women and 'girls', and between women and men. Those girls deemed pretty enough to be at the center of the most exclusive parties in the world were still outsiders, always adjacent to the real power concentrated in men's hands."
"While claiming to seek egalitarian terms of friendship, without instrumentality, he could profit handsomely from his girls, only to deride them for being inauthentic users when they demanded something in return."
December 13, 2023
Det faktum att jag morgonen efter tentainlämningen direkt sätter mig ner för att läsa klart det sista av den här boken s��ger kanske något om den? Super fascinerande, välskriven och lite heartbreaking. VIP-världen is crazy, man. Måste läsa mer av Mears.
June 28, 2020
Prior to reading this book, the only thought I had really given to the VIP club scene was as a setting where the action movie protagonist and his rivals growl threats to each other before the fight choreography starts. Turns out, in the real world it's there's a whole lot more to it.
Ashley Mears is professor of sociology at Boston University, and this is her ethnography of the "models and bottles" scene at VIP clubs. The three most important groups for her story are the promoters, the "girls", and the clients. The promoters are paid by clubs to bring "girls" (models, or women who could be mistaken for models) to the VIP tables. The girls themselves are not compensated in cash, but with dinner and drinks. The clients are the men that are dropping $1000 on bottles of champagne.
The varieties of inequalities and various motivations of these three groups provides Mears with a platform on which to analyze what the meaning of "work" really is, and what the difference is between friendship and a transactional relationship. She even manages to work in a couple pages on a reexamination of Marxist exploitation. All of this could easily float away in a puff of academic jargon, but Mears keeps everything firmly grounded in the experiences of the people she observes and interviews.
I highly recommend this book. It's not just about the VIP club scene. The methods of analysis used to analyze the scene provided me with a new lens to examine other structurally unequal relationships.
Ashley Mears is professor of sociology at Boston University, and this is her ethnography of the "models and bottles" scene at VIP clubs. The three most important groups for her story are the promoters, the "girls", and the clients. The promoters are paid by clubs to bring "girls" (models, or women who could be mistaken for models) to the VIP tables. The girls themselves are not compensated in cash, but with dinner and drinks. The clients are the men that are dropping $1000 on bottles of champagne.
The varieties of inequalities and various motivations of these three groups provides Mears with a platform on which to analyze what the meaning of "work" really is, and what the difference is between friendship and a transactional relationship. She even manages to work in a couple pages on a reexamination of Marxist exploitation. All of this could easily float away in a puff of academic jargon, but Mears keeps everything firmly grounded in the experiences of the people she observes and interviews.
I highly recommend this book. It's not just about the VIP club scene. The methods of analysis used to analyze the scene provided me with a new lens to examine other structurally unequal relationships.
March 25, 2022
This is a great book for understanding how the VIP clubbing ecosystem works. I picked it up out of curiosity after reading My Body and feeling unsatisfied by the surface level insight it offers into how VIP parties work/what it's like to be an elite model. This book doesn't offer particularly surprising conclusions but fleshes them out with detailed accounts from the perspectives of the models, promoters and attendees involved. The main takeaway for me is the web of unspoken and informal transactions between all the different participants necessary for making a "party" happen: models exchanging looks for wider social circle, validation and to escape isolation; promoters exchange time, effort and extensive flattery for psuedo-status and financial gain; VIP attendees exchanging money and real status for psuedo-status, social circle and business opportunities. Another interesting angle covered is the social-climby side to being a promoter and how it in most cases fails to confer the desired authentic status/power - a good starting point for thinking about how authenticity in general plays with overtly transactional relationships.
It would be interesting to know how the whole ecosystem has been disrupted over the last decade since the authors account is mainly over 2011-2013 i.e. before the rise of Instagram's popularity, the MeToo movement.
It would be interesting to know how the whole ecosystem has been disrupted over the last decade since the authors account is mainly over 2011-2013 i.e. before the rise of Instagram's popularity, the MeToo movement.
August 3, 2020
While I was originally fascinated by this world of "girls", promoters, club owners who fancy the world's party, the lack of an ongoing narrative made this book harder to get through than it needed to be. However, I learned a lot about a world that I will never be a part of - gladly and by it's very nature, I am less a fashion model than a real person who eats bread sometimes - and it was fascinating to glimpse the dark, glittering world beneath the lights. In the end I felt sad for everyone involved, but especially the women.
May 10, 2021
A 31 year old sociology (?) professor follows a few promoters on the party circuit for about 2 years to document the lifestyle at elite clubs. But you can only hear models, bottles, young, thin, tall, attractive so many times before you start feeling like you're reading American Psycho.
The book heavily documents the lifestyles of the promoters, less so the models, and we hardly get any insight into the "whales" or the super wealthy white/Saudi men that drive this whole party circuit economy. Promoters get a cut from the bottle service from the clubs. The models do not get cash payment (but get friends, free fancy dinners, and get to hang out with party promoters and super wealthy men?).
All this smoke and mirrors for 1000% marked up bottles of Don Perrignon, silly.
The information was interesting and overall I liked the book.
The book heavily documents the lifestyles of the promoters, less so the models, and we hardly get any insight into the "whales" or the super wealthy white/Saudi men that drive this whole party circuit economy. Promoters get a cut from the bottle service from the clubs. The models do not get cash payment (but get friends, free fancy dinners, and get to hang out with party promoters and super wealthy men?).
All this smoke and mirrors for 1000% marked up bottles of Don Perrignon, silly.
The information was interesting and overall I liked the book.
September 12, 2020
Interesting, academic take on club / VIP nightlife culture and sociology. However, didn't feel very well organized and the repetitiveness of the nightlife visuals at times made me forget the points she was trying to make
August 1, 2022
I’m torn on this book. I’ve been really interested in sociological research in the realm of the wealthy and elite. This book is really interesting, but I think I didn’t like it as much because it was a lot of conversations and storytelling with minimal sociology. Don’t get me wrong, Ashley Mears is an awesome writer, but I was looking for something with more ties to social theory. There’s quite a bit in here, but you’ll go pages and pages and pages before touching on it inbetween stories, conversations, and regular commentary from the author.
What’s fascinating about this book is how beautiful women are used as a sign of status in the world of the wealthy. And when I say beautiful women, I mean models. It’s not my personal taste but it’s what’s seen as the pinnacle of beauty. Mears spends time with club promotors whose job it is to find the most beautiful women and just bring them to clubs and on trips to party so rich men can look cool.
Where the book is interesting is just seeing how these women are treated by the promotors as well as by the wealthy men. They’re treated like things, and they aren’t treated well. Meanwhile, the promotors almost act like pimps, and they have the personalities you’d expect, but they don’t seem to understand that they’ll never be the wealthy people they think they’ll be.
Overall, aside from being torn on the book, I’m still torn on how bad we’re supposed to feel for the women. On a human level, I feel terrible for them. Nobody should be treated this way. But in a world where so many are suffering and so many women are used and abused and don’t have the privilege these women have, it’s hard to put this on my priority list. Pretty privilege is a thing, and although the women aren’t treated well, they also seem extremely aware of the transactional nature of their position.
Based on something completely outside of their control (their genetics and how they look), they get to travel the world and party. They get experiences that 90% of people can only dream of. So, although I do have sympathy for them, I don’t think we need to start a non-profit organization and use resources when there are so many people suffering in the world.
Anywho, I can go on about this forever. But, if you’re interested in the topic and don’t mind a sociological book with like 70-80% storytelling compared to social theory, check it out. It’ll give you insight into the lives of the wealthy and how they signal status by using other human beings.
What’s fascinating about this book is how beautiful women are used as a sign of status in the world of the wealthy. And when I say beautiful women, I mean models. It’s not my personal taste but it’s what’s seen as the pinnacle of beauty. Mears spends time with club promotors whose job it is to find the most beautiful women and just bring them to clubs and on trips to party so rich men can look cool.
Where the book is interesting is just seeing how these women are treated by the promotors as well as by the wealthy men. They’re treated like things, and they aren’t treated well. Meanwhile, the promotors almost act like pimps, and they have the personalities you’d expect, but they don’t seem to understand that they’ll never be the wealthy people they think they’ll be.
Overall, aside from being torn on the book, I’m still torn on how bad we’re supposed to feel for the women. On a human level, I feel terrible for them. Nobody should be treated this way. But in a world where so many are suffering and so many women are used and abused and don’t have the privilege these women have, it’s hard to put this on my priority list. Pretty privilege is a thing, and although the women aren’t treated well, they also seem extremely aware of the transactional nature of their position.
Based on something completely outside of their control (their genetics and how they look), they get to travel the world and party. They get experiences that 90% of people can only dream of. So, although I do have sympathy for them, I don’t think we need to start a non-profit organization and use resources when there are so many people suffering in the world.
Anywho, I can go on about this forever. But, if you’re interested in the topic and don’t mind a sociological book with like 70-80% storytelling compared to social theory, check it out. It’ll give you insight into the lives of the wealthy and how they signal status by using other human beings.
January 21, 2021
For a rich text version of this book and other writings, check out [DinaburgWrites.com]
Cranking the subject/style balance slider to eleven one way or the other might work—if your style is strong enough it, like the extremely polished foundationally erudite structure of The New Yorker. But for a subject to drag you through something tediously constructed, you probably need to already be really interested in what it is dissecting. This might explain why I saw a nearly six-hour runtime on a Tokimeki Memorial analysis and thought to myself, “Why, this is a reasonable amount of time. I, for one, might even wish for it to be a bit longer.” (Not that it is tediously constructed, but six hours watching a YouTube video is a big ask, no matter the context.)
So it may be far easier to pitch a balanced approached to the subject/style factors. Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit is not a six-hour video: it is not a dense tome containing endless pages. Which is probably the right choice for a subject matter that might not engender the same zeal as the hobbyist, pseudoacademic retrospective navel-gazing something like an unavailable-in-English foundational adventure/dating game from the early 1990s would amongst the video game cognescenti. It has interviews with people like meme-candidate Sam, a 33yr old hedge fund manager living the hedge fund manager life that anyone voluntarily picking up a sociological examination of the gliterrati club scene holds as the stereotype for his ilk in their mind:
[ Read the rest of this review at DinaburgWrites.com ]
Cranking the subject/style balance slider to eleven one way or the other might work—if your style is strong enough it, like the extremely polished foundationally erudite structure of The New Yorker. But for a subject to drag you through something tediously constructed, you probably need to already be really interested in what it is dissecting. This might explain why I saw a nearly six-hour runtime on a Tokimeki Memorial analysis and thought to myself, “Why, this is a reasonable amount of time. I, for one, might even wish for it to be a bit longer.” (Not that it is tediously constructed, but six hours watching a YouTube video is a big ask, no matter the context.)
So it may be far easier to pitch a balanced approached to the subject/style factors. Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit is not a six-hour video: it is not a dense tome containing endless pages. Which is probably the right choice for a subject matter that might not engender the same zeal as the hobbyist, pseudoacademic retrospective navel-gazing something like an unavailable-in-English foundational adventure/dating game from the early 1990s would amongst the video game cognescenti. It has interviews with people like meme-candidate Sam, a 33yr old hedge fund manager living the hedge fund manager life that anyone voluntarily picking up a sociological examination of the gliterrati club scene holds as the stereotype for his ilk in their mind:
“It’s disgusting, kind of. I thought about this before, like is this wrong? Is this a bad use of money? And it don’t think it is, because it’s money spent that creates a lot of good. The money’s not better spent on, like, welfare; I mean I just told you I love Charles Murray”—the social scientist known for his racially charged critiques of social welfare, widely embraced by conservatives—“but really it’s money that’s going back into the economy….and I don’t think it’s better to just give that money, like, to a homeless person or anything. So when I say it’s disgusting, I’m not approaching it from the lens of ‘Let’s feed the starving babies.’
“The reason is because it’s meant to show. It’s the status aspect that is disgusting. They’re doing ti for the sake of being seen. And it’s for the attention and fanfare and that’s why everyone photographs is and posts pictures of it. That’s the part of it that I could not stand.” Implicitly, then, Same did not object to large sums being spent of status objects; rather, the deliberate performance of that status bothered him. The display of wealth, to rich people like Sam, is a violation of decorum.
[ Read the rest of this review at DinaburgWrites.com ]
June 26, 2021
This is a book about the exclusive and strange world of clubbing. It's a book about "the unseen work that makes conspicuous consumption possible," as Mears puts it. This complex society-unto-itself, one that has become increasingly globalized and standardized, has a lot to tell us about wealth. And in this Second Gilded Age of ours, that tells us a lot about our civilization.
Like most sociological books, it tackles sexuality and race. The author in some ways sees party girls as traitors to their sex for self-objectifying, even as she throughout allows for their individualism and rebuffs critiques of them. Racial and sexual stereotypes are overall evidently harmful, but could be put to use in ways that were strong for them in specific moments. After all, while it's sometimes seen as exotic to be a person of color in the scene, this is a book that describes a pretty white and racist culture.
I recommend this book to those who wish for a deep sociological picture of a unique culture. It is not a very academic book, however, even though it is written by an academic; it's a tale of a former model who immersed herself in this world, and came out to tell the strange stories. It's a story of greasy promoters, beautiful models, super-rich guys, and the motivations that make them human. Read it.
Like most sociological books, it tackles sexuality and race. The author in some ways sees party girls as traitors to their sex for self-objectifying, even as she throughout allows for their individualism and rebuffs critiques of them. Racial and sexual stereotypes are overall evidently harmful, but could be put to use in ways that were strong for them in specific moments. After all, while it's sometimes seen as exotic to be a person of color in the scene, this is a book that describes a pretty white and racist culture.
I recommend this book to those who wish for a deep sociological picture of a unique culture. It is not a very academic book, however, even though it is written by an academic; it's a tale of a former model who immersed herself in this world, and came out to tell the strange stories. It's a story of greasy promoters, beautiful models, super-rich guys, and the motivations that make them human. Read it.
April 15, 2023
Very Important People is an ecological study of the VIP nightlife industry, with a focus on the interaction between promoters, “girls”, and the wealthy men that frequent the nightclubs.
For me, the takeaway is that everybody in this sociological system is being exploited in one way or another. The women, many of whom work in the fashion industry, are pitched that showing up to these events will give them career advantages – meanwhile, they are obviously objectified and used as lures to bring wealthy men to clubs. The wealthy men, in turn, crave the attention and societal status achieved from being surrounded by attractive women. The promoters, who bring the women, are deluded by the belief that they are peers of the wealthy men, while in reality they are mostly excluded from the elite circles they help to maintain:
Mears explains the VIP nightlife system with reference to the idea of conspicuous spending (Veblen goods), and in particular, the concept of a “potlatch” – a type of Native American festival that usually involves elaborate feasts and the destruction of property. The VIP nightlife scene is a product of 21st-century capitalism, with luxury consumption and the pursuit of status driving a new desire for high-status objects and experiences. Nevertheless, it is fascinating that the conspicuous spending applies narrowly to the wealthy men paying for drinks/tables in the club – monetary transactions in any other part of the system (e.g. if promoters pay women to show up) are considered very taboo:
Overall, Mears gives a balanced take on the system, explaining it for what it is rather than imposing moral judgments. There are even hints of optimism, for example when Mears shares the stories of people who have played their cards right to transcend the system – though tragically it is these successes, few and far between, that inspire many others to make poor decisions. From a personal perspective, I enjoyed the book because it explains a lot of my empirical observations of nights out, such as but not limited to getting turned away at the door of several NYC nightclubs. I am grateful to know I can blame the system rather than myself!
My highlights here.
For me, the takeaway is that everybody in this sociological system is being exploited in one way or another. The women, many of whom work in the fashion industry, are pitched that showing up to these events will give them career advantages – meanwhile, they are obviously objectified and used as lures to bring wealthy men to clubs. The wealthy men, in turn, crave the attention and societal status achieved from being surrounded by attractive women. The promoters, who bring the women, are deluded by the belief that they are peers of the wealthy men, while in reality they are mostly excluded from the elite circles they help to maintain:
Promoters were crucial to putting these dreamworlds together, and they were heavily invested in the belief that they too fully belonged in them. For all of their dreaming, promoters remain mostly shut out of the elite.
Mears explains the VIP nightlife system with reference to the idea of conspicuous spending (Veblen goods), and in particular, the concept of a “potlatch” – a type of Native American festival that usually involves elaborate feasts and the destruction of property. The VIP nightlife scene is a product of 21st-century capitalism, with luxury consumption and the pursuit of status driving a new desire for high-status objects and experiences. Nevertheless, it is fascinating that the conspicuous spending applies narrowly to the wealthy men paying for drinks/tables in the club – monetary transactions in any other part of the system (e.g. if promoters pay women to show up) are considered very taboo:
In paying for wildly inflated prices on alcohol, clients buy the invisibility of the labor it took to bring girls to them; they pay to not have to bring girls themselves, or to pay a broker outright to procure girls. They are buying, in part, the illusion of spontaneity.
Overall, Mears gives a balanced take on the system, explaining it for what it is rather than imposing moral judgments. There are even hints of optimism, for example when Mears shares the stories of people who have played their cards right to transcend the system – though tragically it is these successes, few and far between, that inspire many others to make poor decisions. From a personal perspective, I enjoyed the book because it explains a lot of my empirical observations of nights out, such as but not limited to getting turned away at the door of several NYC nightclubs. I am grateful to know I can blame the system rather than myself!
My highlights here.
November 28, 2021
The writing was somewhat repetitive (how many times do you need to reiterate that models are tall) but I thought the subject matter revolving around the vapid, wasteful and exploitative theatrics of VIP parties. was really fascinating. It's nice to walk away NOT feeling envious of beautiful, adored models and once again blaming the gross narcissist men of the 1%.
I appreciated the way it made me think about power dynamics and exploitative relationships, especially those that are sometimes mutually beneficial.
I appreciated the way it made me think about power dynamics and exploitative relationships, especially those that are sometimes mutually beneficial.
July 22, 2022
Loved it, fascinating, what is wrong with rich people
April 6, 2024
作者的隨行（go-along)研究讓人大開眼界，她為我們鉅細靡遺地展示了頂級夜生活的運作方式，還有夜店公關、女孩與客戶之間的動力與期待，而女孩又如何在看似為自願勞動的狀況下被剝削，公關賺了假錢而日益膨脹的野心也令人唏噓。
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一些看完此書後學得的名詞：女孩資本／情欲資本／有色資本／誇富宴／生活風格工資
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一些看完此書後學得的名詞：女孩資本／情欲資本／有色資本／誇富宴／生活風格工資
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 29, 2021
“[Power] Some of it is fleeting —like women’s beauty, a short-lived asset that gets them into the room, but not recognition as serious players once inside.” (21)
“The top 0.1 % of families in America now own roughly the same share of wealth as the entire bottom 90 %.” (22)
“Olivier Godechot has noted the rise of the ‘working rich,’ whose fortunes come from booming industries like finance, real estate, and technology, where incomes and bonuses can outpace investment gains among the wealthy.” (23)
“[Thorstein] Veblen observed, among the rich, a high-class wife has delicate hands and impractical dress to indicate that she is both useless and expensive, a testament to her husband’s success.” (28)
“VIP clubs offer a stage for this hard-working leisure class to play out conspicuous consumption, and this form of display has spread to cities around the world.” (28)
“Most people imagined ostentation was an inherent trait of the rich. I found, however, that it takes considerable coordinated effort.” (29)
“Conspicuous consumption... begins, like all good performances, with the right audience and the right staging.” (30)
“A ‘girl’ is a social category of woman recognized as so highly valuable that she has the potential to designate a space as ‘very important.’ While most nightclubs want more women than men inside as a matter of security, the quantity of women does not alone suffice to distinguish a place as VIP. To be VIP, a club needs a high quantity of so-called ‘quality’ women. These are the girls: they are young (typically 16 to 25 years old), thin, and tall (at least 5 feet 9 without heels and over 6 feet with them). They are typically though not exclusively white, owing to the dominant preference for white women among both elite men and the fashion industry. The most obvious physical features of the girls —beauty, height, and body shape— take primacy over their personalities or other embodied cues of class such as accent or charm, especially given the low lighting and loud music common at nearly every club.” (30)
“In the VIP arena... there is an unspoken but widely understood logic: girls are valuable; women are not.” (35)
“Clubs are careful to admit the right number of exceptions to conceal racial bias, making it much harder to legally prosecute.” (38)
“Unlike the seemingly available bottle girl, the fashion model represents not sex but beauty —a prize of far greater status.” (45)
“In this world, girls function as a form of capital. Their beauty generates enormous symbolic and economic resources for the men in their presence, but that capital is worth far more to men than to the girls who embody it.” (53)
“Promoters were crucial to putting these dreamworlds together, and they were heavily invested in the belief that they too fully belonged in them. For all of their dreaming, promoters remain mostly shut out of the elite.” (53)
“[A] Public character... need have no special talents or wisdom to fulfill his function… His main qualification is that he is public, and he talks to lots of different people.”, Jane Jacobs (60)
“To most people, models represent the dream. They represent the elite, trendy world, the high-end world of fashion and beauty. They are the dream.”, Dre (61)
“Their work necessitated a restructuring of their vision around 4 key indicators: height, slenderness, youth, and facial beauty. This vision of beauty defines the VIP field as a high-status space, crowding out and even belittling alternative visions of beauty.” (61)
“Potlatch... In effect, and in reality, not only are useful things given away and rich foods consumed to excess, but one even destroys for the pleasure of destroying. (Marcel Mauss, 1954, There seems to be consensus that potlatch was mostly, if not entirely, a status-generating ritual.)” (89)
“Status was most obviously generated when a nobleman gave gifts so large that his rivals could not reciprocate, provoking their humiliation and establishing his dominance.” (89)
“Potlatch is about rank. It can be playful and transgressive, but it is always rooted in systems of prestige and power.” (90)
“Top dogs, big-men, bosses: these performances are organizational achievements. As it turns out, being a part of the show is itself highly appealing to the filler, affluent tourists, and businessmen whose smaller table bills bankroll the show.” (99)
“While their [club] reputations are built by catering to whales, the bulk of the clubbing business is won by appealing to ‘the lettuce.’” (100)
“The collective effervescence is a cooperative social production: girls join with promoters to produce the vibe, which is engineered and staged by management.” (105)
“The key organizational problem that clubs must overcome. VIP clubs have to go a long way to mobilize people to break these norms, to show off, and to create an environment where such behavior is normal, even applauded.” (108)
“Status is a sensitive thing. It exists only when an audience recognizes it, and it cannot be bought outright without, of course, a loss of status.” (109)
“These discourses may be a response to the global crisis of whiteness, or even ‘white panic,’ which describes anxieties of changing class and racial hierarchies in American society and around the world. At least in East Asia, which is now the most economically dynamic region in the world, whites are no longer considered the most elite customers of VIP clubs, nor are white women the most central signifiers of status” (112)
“For a display of wealth to be meaningful, the right people have to bear witness to it” (116)
“The term ‘girl’ came into popular usage in England in the 1880s to describe working-class unmarried women who occupied an emerging social space between childhood and adulthood. Not quite a child, she was childlike in that she had yet to become a wife or mother, the type of modern urbanite who engaged in ‘frivolous’ pursuits like consumption, leisure, romance, and fashion.” (143)
“Worthless as humans though priceless as image.” (144)
“The notion of beauty as women’s ‘erotic capital’ is popular but thinly supported by data. Hypergamy, or ‘marrying up,’ might look like a way in which women can use their erotic capital, but most of the research on assortative mating shows that homogamy is actually more common, and, since the 1980s, men are increasingly marrying women with similar education and income.” (157)
“Sexuality has always had asymmetrical consequences for men and women. Men gain status and respect with their sexual conquests, while promiscuity ruins a woman’s respectability. Girls may have abundant riches in the form of bodily capital, but their capacity to spend it is limited by gendered rules of sexual conduct.” (158)
“You never knew where the night could take you, or with whom. But it rarely seemed to amount to anything beyond brief romantic liaisons. Girls may have been at the center of the action, but they remained on the margins of men’s powerful networks.” (166)
“Beauty may look like a route to get ahead for women, but, in fact, beauty is worth more in men’s hands than in women’s own.” (167)
“Objectification itself may be pleasurable and empowering for women —especially when being objectified by the rich.” (172)
“One powerful pull for women to join the VIP scene is precisely the knowledge that other women are not allowed in. Part of the fun is getting to join a world that excludes and devalues others. Women thus strike a patriarchal bargain by gaining access in exchange for their own subordination as girls in the VIP world.” (174)
“In a supposedly post-feminist world, equality is talked about as a matter of individual rights and access. But empowerment is never an individual project.” (174)
“Those girls deemed pretty enough to be at the center of the most exclusive parties in the world were still outsiders, always adjacent to the real power concentrated in men’s hands. The organizational trick, mastered by promoters and orchestrated by club managers, was to get girls to consent to these terms, without seeing it as exploitation.” (174)
“Promoters are in the business of extracting value from girls, work which is most effectively done by forming relationships with them. This potential source of tension between friendship and economic utility, between intimacy and money, looms over the relationships of all promoters.” (179)
“Promoters show us that exploitation works best when it feels good.” (182)
“VIP treating has expanded as a system to subsidize the fashion industry’s low wages and to capitalize on models’ unusual position as, on the one hand, a precarious labor force and, on the other, a highly valuable commodity.” (198)
“It’s an arrangement that looks like sex work. But it feels qualitatively different than sex work, because the club does not sell the company of girls directly... Paying for women outright is stigmatized, but there is nothing wrong with paying for drinks. By bundling expensive bottles with beautiful girls, clients get the illusion of authentic company with girls.” (198)
“Girls perform emotional and physical labors that mirror what sociologists have termed ‘aesthetic labor,’ common in the service industries. Flight attendants, retail workers, waiters —pretty much anyone in service has to ‘look good and sound right’ according to their company’s brand identity. Workers must pull this off even when they don’t feel like it; it’s part of their job.” (215)
“There’s a difference between being used and getting taken advantage of.”, Malcolm (238)
“In contemporary market society, we draw sharp distinctions between interested and disinterested ties. But ‘pure’ friendship is always an idealization, one that misleads us from seeing reciprocity and mutual obligation at the very foundation of all social relations.” (240)
“Lots of us use our friends for economic gain, but importantly, we follow social expectations for using —and being used— in ways that feel acceptable.” (240)
“We tend to think a relationship is either exploitative or authentic and pure. But exploitation works best when it is enjoyable and when it feels like a relation of authentic friendship.” (240)
“Exploit girls in the classic Marxist sense in that they can extract surplus value from girls’ bodies, because they have a structural advantage over girls, who are unable to broker girls or benefit as much from their own value.” (240)
“Service relationships do not generally enable the accumulation of ties that yield social mobility. Yet promoters believe otherwise” (254)
“Sharing moments of leisure and the illusion of friendly relations with clients —thereby denying the economic importance of those friendships— put the promoter in a difficult position. It set up asymmetrical expectations between the two parties: clients expected fun and short-term contact, while promoters expected long-term ties with economic-mobility opportunities.” (259)
“[The doormen said] ‘No trainers, no hats.’ This is a familiar code of racial exclusion, an implicit method to exclude blacks on the basis of stylistic choices, for wearing the ‘wrong’ shoes or clothes, those usually associated with poor, black, and marginal populations —the very people credited with creating the hip-hop music that is now celebrated by white clubbers.” (263)
“The worth of color capital, like all forms of capital, is field-specific; beyond the VIP club walls, blackness could quickly become a liability to promoters. This is the double edge of blackness in the VIP circuit: cool but dangerous, exotic but polluting, desirable only in small quantities, and rarely fitting in fully with the elite.” (264)
“How one acquires social capital has an effect on the perceived legitimacy of its holder. Despite promoters’ efforts to redefine transactional clients into genuine ‘friends,’ physical proximity couldn’t compensate for the social distance between promoters and their clients, a predicament shared among flight attendants, chauffeurs, and other personal service workers who cater to elites.” (265)
“It is perhaps counterintuitive to think of consumption as a means of producing value.” (269)
“To be rich has never been a guarantee of being elite. Everyone knows that money does not guarantee status. The challenge of trying to translate money into elite status is illustrated by plenty of famous cases.” (271)
“‘Cultural capital,’ what French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu identified as the mastery of upper-class cultural codes. The mannerisms and habits of the elite may appear ‘natural,’ but they are the product of a long process of socialization into the tacit rules of upper-class taste and distinction. Only through experience could a person master the right skills and knowledge to claim belonging within elite society.” (271)
“The importance of displays of economic power or ‘pecuniary might.’” (271)
“[Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre] Exceptional objects, things that are sold by the rich to the rich and are valued mostly for the fact of their expensiveness.” (272)
“Since the 1990s, businesses have increasingly been advised to adopt themes and to sell not just goods and services but memorable moments to their customers; the experience itself, as well as its memory, is the product.” (272)
“Depending on the context, conspicuous consumption generates not status but disdain; one need only consider journalistic critiques of elite lifestyles, as well as the way clients themselves talked with disdain about their own expenditures. VIP clubs have to enable the potlatch to unfold in a way that suspends the deliberateness of status-seeking, primarily by making it seem spontaneous and playful. It takes an enormous amount of labor to pull off a successful potlatch performance. Like any organized social form, the potlatch is a collective ritual that unfolds in carefully scripted situations; it is constituted by a shared culture of excess and the collective valorization of waste.” (273)
“Rather than being frivolous and inconsequential behavior, consumption and even waste are in fact organizing principles of the global economy, argued the mid-20th-century philosopher Georges Bataille. Every society, in one way or another, designs ways to destroy excess in a ritualized way, Bataille argued.” (273)
“A ritual expression of our manifestly unequal society in 21st-century capitalism. Rituals of sacrifice, war, gladiator games, monuments, and, today, luxury retail, casinos, and nightclubs are shows of waste that are constitutive of social life; they shape our dreams and desires, and they merit careful attention” (274)
“The ‘ownership of women,’ noted Veblen over a century ago, is one of the most prominent means for men to conspicuously display their status, a gendered relation of power that continues to govern the VIP scene and beyond. The exclusion and devaluation of persons of color, meanwhile, characterizes VIP spaces and reveals assumptions that the elite spaces are largely white. The performance of economic domination hinges on masculine domination and white supremacy." (274)
“Like a kind of currency, girl capital can be converted by men into status, social connections, and lucrative business deals. Clients can also use girls to climb elite hierarchies by building social ties to other very important people. The economic value of girls is enormous if one considers their centrality to a network of industries spanning finance, fashion, entertainment, and urban development. Measured by the volumes of capital they generate for men, girls are priceless. But they are seen as worthless as long-term relationship partners and are largely unpaid for their work.” (277)
“Social closure happens when groups hoard opportunities among themselves and keep outsiders from joining. Rich clients and club owners extract the benefits of girl capital while dangling dreams of joining their ranks to men like Dre. The VIP party looks like an arena in which outsiders can join elite networks, but sexist tropes and social distance mark girls and promoters as unfit for long-term relationships.” (279)
“Margarethe Kusenbach’s ‘go-along’ method, a hybrid of interviewing and participant observation where researchers follow participants on their daily (and nightly) rounds, recording their interactions through space and their interpretations of events as they unfold in situ, as a way to study the social architecture around physical places.” (282)
“Wealth elites, to indicate persons with large stores of economic capital, which typically though not necessarily come with greater social and political influence.” (286)
“Low-educated men saw their leisure hours grow to 39.1 hours a week in 2003 from 36.6 h in 1985. Highly educated men saw their leisure hours shrink to 33.2 h from 34.4 h in that time period. However, highly educated, high-income professionals also have more control over their hours and more fulfilling work than the working poor (Attanasio, Hurst, and Pistaferri 2015).” (288)
“Conspicuous consumption is only possible in an open society that allows for social mobility. However, this societal condition also allows for the possibility that people can ‘fake’ their status by consuming things they cannot actually afford, such as on credit. In the VIP club, clients may make extravagant purchases only to refuse payment at the end of the night, for instance by paying with a bad credit card or disputing the purchase after the fact. Payment disputes occasionally go to court in high-profile lawsuits.” (288)
“Social closure, (Max Weber 1922) occurs wherever the competition for a livelihood creates groups interested in reducing that competition. These exclusions may be based on any convenient or visible characteristic, including race, social background, language, religion, and gender, although with the passage of formal legal protections over the 20th century, exclusion based on ascribed criteria has been replaced by exclusion based on ‘individualistic’ criteria such as educational credentials, knowledge, or property ownership (Collins 1979).” (293)
“Masculinity is never a static identity, but rather must be constantly reclaimed (Connell 1995). Girls provide the stage for men to display their heterosexuality and assert their dominance and masculinity. Even if the men don’t have sex with girls, even if they don’t talk with the girls, men get to perform their dominance over women. A man’s male peers are the intended audience for competitive games of sexual reputation and peer status and public displays of situational dominance, as well as a means by which a certain type of masculinity is produced and heterosexual desire displayed (Bird 1996).” (302)
“The top 0.1 % of families in America now own roughly the same share of wealth as the entire bottom 90 %.” (22)
“Olivier Godechot has noted the rise of the ‘working rich,’ whose fortunes come from booming industries like finance, real estate, and technology, where incomes and bonuses can outpace investment gains among the wealthy.” (23)
“[Thorstein] Veblen observed, among the rich, a high-class wife has delicate hands and impractical dress to indicate that she is both useless and expensive, a testament to her husband’s success.” (28)
“VIP clubs offer a stage for this hard-working leisure class to play out conspicuous consumption, and this form of display has spread to cities around the world.” (28)
“Most people imagined ostentation was an inherent trait of the rich. I found, however, that it takes considerable coordinated effort.” (29)
“Conspicuous consumption... begins, like all good performances, with the right audience and the right staging.” (30)
“A ‘girl’ is a social category of woman recognized as so highly valuable that she has the potential to designate a space as ‘very important.’ While most nightclubs want more women than men inside as a matter of security, the quantity of women does not alone suffice to distinguish a place as VIP. To be VIP, a club needs a high quantity of so-called ‘quality’ women. These are the girls: they are young (typically 16 to 25 years old), thin, and tall (at least 5 feet 9 without heels and over 6 feet with them). They are typically though not exclusively white, owing to the dominant preference for white women among both elite men and the fashion industry. The most obvious physical features of the girls —beauty, height, and body shape— take primacy over their personalities or other embodied cues of class such as accent or charm, especially given the low lighting and loud music common at nearly every club.” (30)
“In the VIP arena... there is an unspoken but widely understood logic: girls are valuable; women are not.” (35)
“Clubs are careful to admit the right number of exceptions to conceal racial bias, making it much harder to legally prosecute.” (38)
“Unlike the seemingly available bottle girl, the fashion model represents not sex but beauty —a prize of far greater status.” (45)
“In this world, girls function as a form of capital. Their beauty generates enormous symbolic and economic resources for the men in their presence, but that capital is worth far more to men than to the girls who embody it.” (53)
“Promoters were crucial to putting these dreamworlds together, and they were heavily invested in the belief that they too fully belonged in them. For all of their dreaming, promoters remain mostly shut out of the elite.” (53)
“[A] Public character... need have no special talents or wisdom to fulfill his function… His main qualification is that he is public, and he talks to lots of different people.”, Jane Jacobs (60)
“To most people, models represent the dream. They represent the elite, trendy world, the high-end world of fashion and beauty. They are the dream.”, Dre (61)
“Their work necessitated a restructuring of their vision around 4 key indicators: height, slenderness, youth, and facial beauty. This vision of beauty defines the VIP field as a high-status space, crowding out and even belittling alternative visions of beauty.” (61)
“Potlatch... In effect, and in reality, not only are useful things given away and rich foods consumed to excess, but one even destroys for the pleasure of destroying. (Marcel Mauss, 1954, There seems to be consensus that potlatch was mostly, if not entirely, a status-generating ritual.)” (89)
“Status was most obviously generated when a nobleman gave gifts so large that his rivals could not reciprocate, provoking their humiliation and establishing his dominance.” (89)
“Potlatch is about rank. It can be playful and transgressive, but it is always rooted in systems of prestige and power.” (90)
“Top dogs, big-men, bosses: these performances are organizational achievements. As it turns out, being a part of the show is itself highly appealing to the filler, affluent tourists, and businessmen whose smaller table bills bankroll the show.” (99)
“While their [club] reputations are built by catering to whales, the bulk of the clubbing business is won by appealing to ‘the lettuce.’” (100)
“The collective effervescence is a cooperative social production: girls join with promoters to produce the vibe, which is engineered and staged by management.” (105)
“The key organizational problem that clubs must overcome. VIP clubs have to go a long way to mobilize people to break these norms, to show off, and to create an environment where such behavior is normal, even applauded.” (108)
“Status is a sensitive thing. It exists only when an audience recognizes it, and it cannot be bought outright without, of course, a loss of status.” (109)
“These discourses may be a response to the global crisis of whiteness, or even ‘white panic,’ which describes anxieties of changing class and racial hierarchies in American society and around the world. At least in East Asia, which is now the most economically dynamic region in the world, whites are no longer considered the most elite customers of VIP clubs, nor are white women the most central signifiers of status” (112)
“For a display of wealth to be meaningful, the right people have to bear witness to it” (116)
“The term ‘girl’ came into popular usage in England in the 1880s to describe working-class unmarried women who occupied an emerging social space between childhood and adulthood. Not quite a child, she was childlike in that she had yet to become a wife or mother, the type of modern urbanite who engaged in ‘frivolous’ pursuits like consumption, leisure, romance, and fashion.” (143)
“Worthless as humans though priceless as image.” (144)
“The notion of beauty as women’s ‘erotic capital’ is popular but thinly supported by data. Hypergamy, or ‘marrying up,’ might look like a way in which women can use their erotic capital, but most of the research on assortative mating shows that homogamy is actually more common, and, since the 1980s, men are increasingly marrying women with similar education and income.” (157)
“Sexuality has always had asymmetrical consequences for men and women. Men gain status and respect with their sexual conquests, while promiscuity ruins a woman’s respectability. Girls may have abundant riches in the form of bodily capital, but their capacity to spend it is limited by gendered rules of sexual conduct.” (158)
“You never knew where the night could take you, or with whom. But it rarely seemed to amount to anything beyond brief romantic liaisons. Girls may have been at the center of the action, but they remained on the margins of men’s powerful networks.” (166)
“Beauty may look like a route to get ahead for women, but, in fact, beauty is worth more in men’s hands than in women’s own.” (167)
“Objectification itself may be pleasurable and empowering for women —especially when being objectified by the rich.” (172)
“One powerful pull for women to join the VIP scene is precisely the knowledge that other women are not allowed in. Part of the fun is getting to join a world that excludes and devalues others. Women thus strike a patriarchal bargain by gaining access in exchange for their own subordination as girls in the VIP world.” (174)
“In a supposedly post-feminist world, equality is talked about as a matter of individual rights and access. But empowerment is never an individual project.” (174)
“Those girls deemed pretty enough to be at the center of the most exclusive parties in the world were still outsiders, always adjacent to the real power concentrated in men’s hands. The organizational trick, mastered by promoters and orchestrated by club managers, was to get girls to consent to these terms, without seeing it as exploitation.” (174)
“Promoters are in the business of extracting value from girls, work which is most effectively done by forming relationships with them. This potential source of tension between friendship and economic utility, between intimacy and money, looms over the relationships of all promoters.” (179)
“Promoters show us that exploitation works best when it feels good.” (182)
“VIP treating has expanded as a system to subsidize the fashion industry’s low wages and to capitalize on models’ unusual position as, on the one hand, a precarious labor force and, on the other, a highly valuable commodity.” (198)
“It’s an arrangement that looks like sex work. But it feels qualitatively different than sex work, because the club does not sell the company of girls directly... Paying for women outright is stigmatized, but there is nothing wrong with paying for drinks. By bundling expensive bottles with beautiful girls, clients get the illusion of authentic company with girls.” (198)
“Girls perform emotional and physical labors that mirror what sociologists have termed ‘aesthetic labor,’ common in the service industries. Flight attendants, retail workers, waiters —pretty much anyone in service has to ‘look good and sound right’ according to their company’s brand identity. Workers must pull this off even when they don’t feel like it; it’s part of their job.” (215)
“There’s a difference between being used and getting taken advantage of.”, Malcolm (238)
“In contemporary market society, we draw sharp distinctions between interested and disinterested ties. But ‘pure’ friendship is always an idealization, one that misleads us from seeing reciprocity and mutual obligation at the very foundation of all social relations.” (240)
“Lots of us use our friends for economic gain, but importantly, we follow social expectations for using —and being used— in ways that feel acceptable.” (240)
“We tend to think a relationship is either exploitative or authentic and pure. But exploitation works best when it is enjoyable and when it feels like a relation of authentic friendship.” (240)
“Exploit girls in the classic Marxist sense in that they can extract surplus value from girls’ bodies, because they have a structural advantage over girls, who are unable to broker girls or benefit as much from their own value.” (240)
“Service relationships do not generally enable the accumulation of ties that yield social mobility. Yet promoters believe otherwise” (254)
“Sharing moments of leisure and the illusion of friendly relations with clients —thereby denying the economic importance of those friendships— put the promoter in a difficult position. It set up asymmetrical expectations between the two parties: clients expected fun and short-term contact, while promoters expected long-term ties with economic-mobility opportunities.” (259)
“[The doormen said] ‘No trainers, no hats.’ This is a familiar code of racial exclusion, an implicit method to exclude blacks on the basis of stylistic choices, for wearing the ‘wrong’ shoes or clothes, those usually associated with poor, black, and marginal populations —the very people credited with creating the hip-hop music that is now celebrated by white clubbers.” (263)
“The worth of color capital, like all forms of capital, is field-specific; beyond the VIP club walls, blackness could quickly become a liability to promoters. This is the double edge of blackness in the VIP circuit: cool but dangerous, exotic but polluting, desirable only in small quantities, and rarely fitting in fully with the elite.” (264)
“How one acquires social capital has an effect on the perceived legitimacy of its holder. Despite promoters’ efforts to redefine transactional clients into genuine ‘friends,’ physical proximity couldn’t compensate for the social distance between promoters and their clients, a predicament shared among flight attendants, chauffeurs, and other personal service workers who cater to elites.” (265)
“It is perhaps counterintuitive to think of consumption as a means of producing value.” (269)
“To be rich has never been a guarantee of being elite. Everyone knows that money does not guarantee status. The challenge of trying to translate money into elite status is illustrated by plenty of famous cases.” (271)
“‘Cultural capital,’ what French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu identified as the mastery of upper-class cultural codes. The mannerisms and habits of the elite may appear ‘natural,’ but they are the product of a long process of socialization into the tacit rules of upper-class taste and distinction. Only through experience could a person master the right skills and knowledge to claim belonging within elite society.” (271)
“The importance of displays of economic power or ‘pecuniary might.’” (271)
“[Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre] Exceptional objects, things that are sold by the rich to the rich and are valued mostly for the fact of their expensiveness.” (272)
“Since the 1990s, businesses have increasingly been advised to adopt themes and to sell not just goods and services but memorable moments to their customers; the experience itself, as well as its memory, is the product.” (272)
“Depending on the context, conspicuous consumption generates not status but disdain; one need only consider journalistic critiques of elite lifestyles, as well as the way clients themselves talked with disdain about their own expenditures. VIP clubs have to enable the potlatch to unfold in a way that suspends the deliberateness of status-seeking, primarily by making it seem spontaneous and playful. It takes an enormous amount of labor to pull off a successful potlatch performance. Like any organized social form, the potlatch is a collective ritual that unfolds in carefully scripted situations; it is constituted by a shared culture of excess and the collective valorization of waste.” (273)
“Rather than being frivolous and inconsequential behavior, consumption and even waste are in fact organizing principles of the global economy, argued the mid-20th-century philosopher Georges Bataille. Every society, in one way or another, designs ways to destroy excess in a ritualized way, Bataille argued.” (273)
“A ritual expression of our manifestly unequal society in 21st-century capitalism. Rituals of sacrifice, war, gladiator games, monuments, and, today, luxury retail, casinos, and nightclubs are shows of waste that are constitutive of social life; they shape our dreams and desires, and they merit careful attention” (274)
“The ‘ownership of women,’ noted Veblen over a century ago, is one of the most prominent means for men to conspicuously display their status, a gendered relation of power that continues to govern the VIP scene and beyond. The exclusion and devaluation of persons of color, meanwhile, characterizes VIP spaces and reveals assumptions that the elite spaces are largely white. The performance of economic domination hinges on masculine domination and white supremacy." (274)
“Like a kind of currency, girl capital can be converted by men into status, social connections, and lucrative business deals. Clients can also use girls to climb elite hierarchies by building social ties to other very important people. The economic value of girls is enormous if one considers their centrality to a network of industries spanning finance, fashion, entertainment, and urban development. Measured by the volumes of capital they generate for men, girls are priceless. But they are seen as worthless as long-term relationship partners and are largely unpaid for their work.” (277)
“Social closure happens when groups hoard opportunities among themselves and keep outsiders from joining. Rich clients and club owners extract the benefits of girl capital while dangling dreams of joining their ranks to men like Dre. The VIP party looks like an arena in which outsiders can join elite networks, but sexist tropes and social distance mark girls and promoters as unfit for long-term relationships.” (279)
“Margarethe Kusenbach’s ‘go-along’ method, a hybrid of interviewing and participant observation where researchers follow participants on their daily (and nightly) rounds, recording their interactions through space and their interpretations of events as they unfold in situ, as a way to study the social architecture around physical places.” (282)
“Wealth elites, to indicate persons with large stores of economic capital, which typically though not necessarily come with greater social and political influence.” (286)
“Low-educated men saw their leisure hours grow to 39.1 hours a week in 2003 from 36.6 h in 1985. Highly educated men saw their leisure hours shrink to 33.2 h from 34.4 h in that time period. However, highly educated, high-income professionals also have more control over their hours and more fulfilling work than the working poor (Attanasio, Hurst, and Pistaferri 2015).” (288)
“Conspicuous consumption is only possible in an open society that allows for social mobility. However, this societal condition also allows for the possibility that people can ‘fake’ their status by consuming things they cannot actually afford, such as on credit. In the VIP club, clients may make extravagant purchases only to refuse payment at the end of the night, for instance by paying with a bad credit card or disputing the purchase after the fact. Payment disputes occasionally go to court in high-profile lawsuits.” (288)
“Social closure, (Max Weber 1922) occurs wherever the competition for a livelihood creates groups interested in reducing that competition. These exclusions may be based on any convenient or visible characteristic, including race, social background, language, religion, and gender, although with the passage of formal legal protections over the 20th century, exclusion based on ascribed criteria has been replaced by exclusion based on ‘individualistic’ criteria such as educational credentials, knowledge, or property ownership (Collins 1979).” (293)
“Masculinity is never a static identity, but rather must be constantly reclaimed (Connell 1995). Girls provide the stage for men to display their heterosexuality and assert their dominance and masculinity. Even if the men don’t have sex with girls, even if they don’t talk with the girls, men get to perform their dominance over women. A man’s male peers are the intended audience for competitive games of sexual reputation and peer status and public displays of situational dominance, as well as a means by which a certain type of masculinity is produced and heterosexual desire displayed (Bird 1996).” (302)
June 28, 2023
Hard to think of another book that used so many words and nearly identical anecdotes to say so little.
DNF
DNF
January 18, 2024
-1 star for making this read like a sociology thesis and
+1 star for it being a really cool and interesting thesis
+1 star for it being a really cool and interesting thesis
May 15, 2021
A book about the 'VIP party circuit' where millionaires/billionaires/sheiks/oligarchs go out and party by popping champagne bottles, focusing on the models that accompany these men in the night clubs. The writer is a former model who does field work by going with the 'promoters' and girls to go out and party and spend time with these people.
It's super weird. I don't really understand why people want to live like this, it seems pretty boring to go to these sorts of parties. But then I'm not really the target audience I guess.
It's super weird. I don't really understand why people want to live like this, it seems pretty boring to go to these sorts of parties. But then I'm not really the target audience I guess.
February 1, 2021
Very good. Really intriguing look into the world of elite and VIP. Also a concerning study on the still-prevalent practice of women's bodies being used as products to help men look better, and these very women being deemed of high worth for their looks and yet, outside the VIP scene, being deemed as worthless by these same people (in terms of their potential for romantic relationships). Fascinating read.
June 18, 2020
In a social world where #Me-Too is nowhere to be found, the excesses of income inequality are on full display, and in the absence of any noticeable intelligence the author conducted a sociological study on “elite” nightlife in NYC and other exclusive locales throughout the world. Ashley Mears gives us plebeians a peek at a social environment where 4 or even 5-figure bottles of bubbly are quaffed (and act as the main item of commerce for all involved), lines of coke snorted, and ecstasy pills are popped in the presence of tall (they MUST be tall) young women, all funded by the top 0.01%. As a sociological study itself, it is fairly fascinating and the luridness of it keeps the pages turning, but in terms of what this social scene says about our world today – that is more of a very sad and depressing statement on life.
Nightlife exists everywhere, but rarely does it reach this level of decadence and pointlessness: the ‘potlatch’ exercise (as Mears describes it) would be more beneficial if it was just these rich a-holes piling up money and giving the same amount to the sycophantic promoters, women, bartenders & waitresses, while sending the excess to charity instead of in a fly-by-night club owner’s pocket. Again, Mears has put together a very interesting case study and makes some keen observations on income inequality, race, and of course gender imbalances and that’s fascinating throughout. I would have rather read a similar case study of a much more egalitarian nightlife such as the one in Berlin going on at the same time as she conducted her research where money couldn’t have bought one entrance to indulge in the experiences on offer.
Nightlife exists everywhere, but rarely does it reach this level of decadence and pointlessness: the ‘potlatch’ exercise (as Mears describes it) would be more beneficial if it was just these rich a-holes piling up money and giving the same amount to the sycophantic promoters, women, bartenders & waitresses, while sending the excess to charity instead of in a fly-by-night club owner’s pocket. Again, Mears has put together a very interesting case study and makes some keen observations on income inequality, race, and of course gender imbalances and that’s fascinating throughout. I would have rather read a similar case study of a much more egalitarian nightlife such as the one in Berlin going on at the same time as she conducted her research where money couldn’t have bought one entrance to indulge in the experiences on offer.
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