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

The first modern models appeared in the Paris salon of English courtier Charles Frederic Worth in the late 1850s, when the famous dressmaker pulled young women from his workshop floor to be mannequins for his wealthy clientele.

In short, promoters show us that exploitation works best when it feels good.

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.

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, leisur

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.

So many people seek this feeling of transcendence. They seek it at sports stadiums, protest marches, Mardi Gras, Burning Man, and homecoming parades—anywhere people come together for a group experience.33 They seek it in sacred ceremony and religious ritual, as French sociologist Émile Durkheim noted, because this feeling is the basis of religion.

The unequal ability of one person to capitalize on another is a classic measure of exploitation in Marx’s terms. Men’s surplus value from girl capital goes largely unseen, since girls’ participation in the clubs is assumed to be fun, leisure, and not work—much like other forms of women’s labor, like care work and reproductive labors in the househol

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.

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.