After authentic models, the next best thing is a woman who looks like she could be a model, a “good civilian.”

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.

Promoters who are good at their jobs make going out fun among friends. They 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.

Like other promoters, Thibault and Felipe questioned the intrinsic beauty of fashion models while wholeheartedly embracing their economic value.

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.

Like girls, champagne bottles are put to work in the service of showing off clients’ expenditures. Champagne has been associated with exclusive celebrations for at least a century and associated with elites since court society monopolized its consumption in prerevolutionary Europe.

By consenting to these terms, Katia upheld a deeply unequal system in which girls circulated between men on men’s terms, while generating surplus value for them in the form of money, social ties, and status. This system is what anthropologist Gayle Rubin referred to, in her now famous 1975 essay, as “the traffic in women.” Rubin had sought to addre

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.

That age “progressively destroys” women, but not men, is the crux of what Susan Sontag termed the double standard of aging, back in 1972.