Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
Since the boom of finance-driven salaries catapulted the “working rich” to the top of the income ladder in the 1990s, there has emerged an inverse relationship between leisure and earnings, such that elites now have less leisure time than their poorer, less-educated counterparts.
Ashley Mears • Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
The club Marquee on Tenth Avenue in Manhattan is often attributed with pioneering bottle culture by hiring image promoters to bring models to attract spenders.
Ashley Mears • Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
We can think of these webs of friendship, favors and gifts, intimacies, obligations, and reciprocities as a relational infrastructure that supports ties between promoters and their girls. If the infrastructure is sound, the exchange goes smoothly, and girls provide valuable labor for promoters that doesn’t look like labor at all; it looks like fun
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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
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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.
Ashley Mears • Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
For a place that seems to be about spontaneous fun, a club is a highly regimented space, one that provides scripts for wasteful behaviors to unfold in patterned ways, from Miami to Cannes.
Ashley Mears • Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
Most clubs make the bulk of their profits from smaller and more reliable table bills, the $1,500 to $3,000 sums spent by groups of affluent tourists and businessmen—your run-of-the-mill banker, tech developer, or other upper-class professional with a disposable income. While on the lower end of importance compared to whales and celebrities, they
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Table service had been the norm in the 1980s at select clubs in Paris, where New York club owners first saw it; in the 1990s they imported it to New York as a way to expedite serving drinks.
Ashley Mears • Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
collective effervescence, an intense social experience understood as a social emotion, the excitement that comes from feeling close—both physically and emotionally—to others.