Capitalism, in the general sense, is unthinkable apart from democracy: There can be no free market without free agents who are able to access it. And yet, democratic subjects have always used the resources of the free market to create status-based hierarchies of the kind democracy and capitalism nominally oppose. Money buys status, but status can’t be put on sale like an ordinary commodity because attainability strips it of its glamour. Billions of dollars are made every year providing the wealthy with access to ostensibly exclusive amusements that have the appearance of unpurchased spontaneity.
Such is the function of the fashionable clubs that are the subject of a provocative and engrossing new book, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit, by Ashley Mears, a professor of sociology at Boston University. In 2011’s Pricing Beauty, Mears gave an intelligent and trenchant insider’s view of the labor dynamics of modeling. Here, she draws on contacts from her own time as a model to examine facets of nightlife most of us only see on television or in rap videos. While she does interview high-rolling clients, men (they are always men) who pay for the $1,000 bottles of Belvedere and the sparkler-lit “champagne trains” of Cristal or Dom Perignon, her real focus is fixed on “image promoters” and the “girls” they bring along, sexily dressed women aged 16 to 25 whose presence is essential to a club’s cachet. These are the people who choreograph and condone what she calls “conspicuous waste,” creating an environment where obnoxious excess is not only accepted but encouraged.
The club scene she describes originated in the 1990s, when money poured into New York real estate and developers invested in previously marginal districts. The most famous of these is Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, a former industrial area now home to the city’s most exclusive boutiques and hot spots. The ‘90s were also when a new affluent class of supermanagers appeared — millionaire executives and traders who saw their salaries skyrocket. As Mears notes, “Elites now have less leisure time than their poorer, less-educated counterparts,” and after logging long hours on the clock, these men approach going out with a work hard, play hard ethos.
In the early days of clubs like the Tunnel, bottle service was an easy way to keep guests’ glasses full and was cheaper for those who planned to spend several hours at their table. Rising prices soon made it clear that guests cared less about what was in the bottle than they did about being known as someone who could afford it. Clubs began stocking costlier wines in larger formats, encouraging spending wars and champagne showers. Paying strangers’ bills and “making it rain” with stacks of dollar bills were soon standard ways of showing yourself to be a big shot, a baller, a boss.
Mears gives a detailed taxonomy of the club scene’s participants, their functions, and their income. The top promoters are VIP hosts, who have real models in their contacts list and can earn more than $1,000 in a night. Next come mass promoters, whose job is to gather bodies: They may even stoop to passing out flyers on college campuses. At the bottom are subs, entry-level gofers who scrape girls together for as little as $50 a shift. The best girls are models, then tall and slender “good civilians,” then “pedestrians,” and, finally, “filler” — those who stand at the bar and drink to make a place look popular. The club pays the promoter to bring girls who attract clients. He typically drinks for free but is expected to tip, and he may also earn a commission on bottles he encourages customers to buy. The best patrons are “whales” like the Malaysian financier and fraudster Jho Low, known for spending $1 million in a single night at a bar in St. Tropez. Whales are rare and may only show up two or three times a year. Then come celebrities, whose tables are often comped. The run-of-the-mill consumers who underwrite the pageantry sometimes make up no more than half the tables in the club. At the bottom are “goons” and the “ghetto crowd,” people unlikely to make it through the door. Their exclusion, irrespective of the cash they have on hand, adds to the illusion that a club’s selectiveness is something more than outright economic (and often racial) discrimination.
The promoters swear they aren’t pimps, and the girls heap scorn on others who use their beauty for financial advantage. Indeed, the stigma against prostitution helps keep them from pleading for a share of the money clients pay the club and promoters for their company. Apart from free food, drinks, vacations, drugs, and cab fare, none of the girls that Mears interviews profit directly from their association with promoters. Big spenders minimize the sexual motive as well. For them, beautiful young women are guarantors of status, with one promoter affirming that what he really sells “is the peace of mind that [someone] is now part of that A-list, that social elite.”
Mears’s concept of “consensual traffic” to describe the girls’ role in this arrangement is useful for a broader critique of agreements that are entered into freely but act against free and equal relations. Her attitude isn’t parochial or dismissive of her informants’ autonomy: She admits that for some women, being objectified can be fun (“especially when being objectified by the rich”). But she recognizes that “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.”
Many of Mears’s subjects think they are living in a Horatio Alger novel; in truth, it is closer to Honore de Balzac. The promoters, mostly immigrants feeding off the scraps of others’ opulence, seem convinced they’re on the verge of breaking big. In the six years Mears spent with them, none of them did. The models have come to New York lured, she writes in Pricing Beauty, by “a promise sustained by a handful of success stories but predicated on a thousand invisible failures.” Both groups view the key to their future in their relationships with the wealthy, mostly white men they insistently refer to as friends. In the short term, this “discursive framing strategy” gives them a feeling of belonging, but it is just that — a feeling. When the promoters approach with an investment idea, their rich friends stop returning their calls, and the girls are derided as “playthings” and “little whores.”
Rigorous without being pedantic, political but not vituperative, Very Important People is a status report on the American dream in the second Gilded Age and the perks and pitfalls of labor in the “luxury leisure services.”
Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator, critic, and the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation.
