Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

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.

“Table girls” and the models at Toni’s table are engaging in very similar practices—looking good and drinking free champagne at tables—but they occupy very different positions. The positions are maintained as distinct through the boundary work performed; in this case, through particular exchange media and discourses: the table girl is paid in cash

Most people, including Veblen, imagined ostentation was an inherent trait of the rich. I found, however, that it takes considerable coordinated effort to mobilize people into what looks likes the spontaneous waste of money, and the VIP nightclub has mastered it.

A promoter seeks girls for whom all three motivations align: if she needs subsidized meals, if she is loyal to his friendship, and if she genuinely enjoys whatever fun can be shared in during the night, she will likely become a regular presence at his table.

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.46 “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

The displays of this “leisure class” were often attempts to outdo one another in a never-ending show of wealth, or “pecuniary emulation”; beneath this extravagance, however, lay deep anxieties about the uncertainty of their status relative to the titled, aristocratic elite.

Because in this rarefied world there is an unspoken but widely understood logic: girls are valuable; women are not.

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

Promoters try to shape girls’ feelings through relational work: strategies by which they try to redefine their economic transactions as part of a personal connection.

The Hamptons has been a destination for rich New Yorkers since the late nineteenth century, when the city’s old moneyed aristocrats and newly minted tycoons transformed the quiet farmland and saltboxes into a summer colony of mansions for high society.