Very Important People

Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

Ashley Mears

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691189895
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

A sociologist and former fashion model takes readers inside the elite global party circuit of "models and bottles" to reveal how beautiful young women are used to boost the status of men Million-dollar birthday parties, megayachts on the French Riviera, and $40, 000 bottles of champagne. In today's New Gilded Age, the world's moneyed classes have taken conspicuous consumption to new extremes. In Very Important People, sociologist, author, and former fashion model Ashley Mears takes readers inside the exclusive global nightclub and party circuit—from New York City and the Hamptons to Miami and Saint-Tropez—to reveal the intricate economy of beauty, status, and money that lies behind these spectacular displays of wealth and leisure.Mears spent eighteen months in this world of "models and bottles" to write this captivating, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking narrative. She describes how clubs and restaurants pay promoters to recruit beautiful young women to their venues in order to attract men and get them to spend huge sums in the ritual of bottle service. These "girls" enhance the status of the men and enrich club owners, exchanging their bodily capital for as little as free drinks and a chance to party with men who are rich or aspire to be. Though they are priceless assets in the party circuit, these women are regarded as worthless as long-term relationship prospects, and their bodies are constantly assessed against men's money.A story of extreme gender inequality in a seductive world, Very Important People unveils troubling realities behind moneyed leisure in an age of record economic disparity.

1

We Are the Cool People

Sunday, 11:30 p.m., New York City

Most people think that ostentation comes easy. Dre’s life was testament to how much work it takes to get people to show off.

It was nearly midnight, and Dre’s table was finishing dinner at the Downtown, a perfectly chic restaurant in SoHo. Dre was flanked on either side by half a dozen beautiful women, beautiful in the way that fashion models are: young and tall with flawless features, their clothes and high heels so stylish, they could have arrived straight from a catwalk. It is hard to look away when they enter the room.

The Downtown is a beautiful sight on Sunday nights. The decor is opulent: plush upholstered furniture, a mahogany bar, an enormous chandelier, and walls adorned with giant iconic prints from famous fashion photographers. There is no music, just the steady buzz of conversations in various European languages, punctuated by laughter and the clink of champagne glasses, immediately refilled by white-coated Italian waiters. Each table is anchored by wealthy men—celebrities and aristocrats, socialites from the gossip pages, actors and musicians and producers, entrepreneurs and bankers—dining in the company of beautiful women.

In the middle of it all was Dre’s table. He held court, steering conversations, Bellinis, and plates of pasta among his guests. Whatever else he was doing, he was also always scanning the room to see who sees him, graciously doling out smiles and winks, and standing up to greet passing guests seamlessly in French or English, with two kisses on each cheek.

Dre was a thirty-eight-year-old black man with a gorgeous smile and a near-shaved head. He dressed in leather pants, a crisp white T-shirt, and a shiny new pair of limited-edition Adidas sneakers, a casual but clearly expensive look he called “rock-and-roll chic.” He was one of the only black people in the place, where he casually bantered and joked with a mostly white crowd. Even as he charmed the rest of the restaurant, he was careful to keep some attention on the women at his table. He flirted with them and cuddled up to whomever was on his arm, which, for the next several months, would be me.

“I love the job of promoter, because look at all the beautiful girls I’m around,” he said. “And some of them like me, which can cause problems.” He winked at the woman sitting across from him. She smirked and shook her head.

Dre loved the attention. He had been hosting women in this restaurant every Sunday night for the past six years; before that, he worked in various clubs for three decades, starting in the early 1990s. In the nightlife business, Dre is known as an image promoter. This means he works freelance, contracting with multiple nightclubs and restaurants throughout the city to bring in a so-called “quality crowd,” understood to consist of attractive women, rich men, celebrities, and other well-connected people. In theory, the crowd he brings in enhances the image of the club and, ultimately, attracts wealthy clients and their money. Each Sunday, the Downtown’s management paid Dre a handsome fee, somewhere between $1,200 and $4,500, depending on the bar spend, from which he took home 25 percent for his five hours of work.

It is a dubious profession. Promoters are widely criticized as pimps and “model wranglers,” for whom the fashion industry’s surplus of underpaid newcomers, known as “girls,” are easy pickings.¹ Sometimes called “PRs” (as in “PRomoter”) for short, these men are reviled by modeling agencies, and every few years they are the subject of high-profile exposés in the press.² At the center of their work is an uncomfortable reality: they are intermediaries in the profitable circulation of women and alcohol among rich men. Dre knew that his work was disreputable, but it was lucrative. He was making over $200,000 a year. Though his income paled in comparison to those of the rich men around him at night, he was confident that the gap would shrink. Working alongside this segment of the new global elite, he believed, would enable him to one day become one of them.

“Ça va?” he said to a passing gentleman in an expensive suit. Dre stood up to shake hands and speak a little; as he sat back down, he whispered in my ear, “That guy’s from a Saudi family. A billionaire.” He winked to a woman sitting at the bar, supposedly the princess of a small nation-state known for offshore banking. As another man approached the table, Dre whispered to me, “He’s really rich, his family. Really rich.” Dre gave him a playful shoulder punch and fist bump. “A girlfriend of mine asked if there are any hot guys here tonight,” Dre offered, followed by a calculated pause. “I said yes when I saw you walk in!”

This is the elite in Dre’s world. It’s not the 1 percent, he told me, “but the 0.0001 percent. That’s the crowd I want around me.”

The women who flank Dre, like myself, only need to look rich, not to be rich. Thankfully so, since it’s unlikely any of us could even pay tonight’s dinner bill. Cocktails, plates of pasta, fresh veggies and salads, fish and steaks, and now desserts and espressos arrived without any of us checking the prices. At the Downtown, I know from my own furtive glances at the menu, one cocktail costs about $20. A salad with beets and goat cheese is $24. I ate dinner here a dozen times over the course of roughly eighteen months researching VIP parties, and I never paid for anything.

As “girls,” our drinks and meals were comped; the endless plates and glasses came to us “compliments of the house.” To host our table, Dre paid a tip to the wait staff, usually about 25 percent of the bill. Each Sunday night, the Downtown forwent over $1,000 just for the pleasure of our company. But in the long run our presence generated far greater value to the Downtown, to the men who dine here, and to Dre himself.

Dre’s guests tended to be women with fledgling careers in fashion modeling, or they were students, or looking for work in fields ranging from design to finance. The main criterion for sitting next to Dre was that you look beautiful. Indeed, earlier that afternoon, Dre had sent me two playful text messages ensuring that I looked the part: “Dress to impress, Ash,” and then a few minutes later, “High Heels.”

Or maybe they weren’t so playful. He was full of compliments when women looked good, and icy when they didn’t. He would turn his back toward women whose looks did not meet his standards—unless they were rich or important in some other way. Once he told a woman of average height, “Go stand over there,” referring to a corner away from his table.

I often felt uneasy in these places and out with Dre, even then as I sat beside him in a new silky dress and four-inch heels. When Dre first agreed I could shadow him in clubs for sociology research, in 2011, I began carrying a hand-me-down Chanel handbag from the 1980s. The bag was a loaner from my sister, who had bought it on eBay for $200, and it was in bad shape. I bought leather patches from a shoe smith and glued them onto the worn-out corners; before long they started to peel off. I kept the bag tucked behind my back, displaying only the signature gold-and-black chain across my chair, playing dress-up with the 1 percent.

But I was not alone: Dre was also playing dress-up with the elite, albeit with far greater ease. He came from a suburban middle-class family in France, the second-generation son of a professional family from Algeria. He dropped out of law school in Paris to pursue a music career in Miami, and when that went bust, he waited tables. For a short stint he was homeless, something you would never have guessed then, as his conversations regularly showed off his connections and entrepreneurial potential. He always boasted about the five or six projects he had in the works—his career as a pop singer, his movie production company, branding for a tech company, the reality television show he was developing, the food shipping company “in Africa” (among the most vague of his ventures), the car service company. The list changed depending on the week, but his essential optimism was always the same. Dre described his business model for the car service as follows: “You start with one car. It becomes two. Then ten. That’s the American way.”

A typical text message from him, when I asked what he was up to on a given day, might read: “I am working on a major business deal! Wish me luck … Within 2 days top I’ll know!! Millions of $ deal.”

“I love nightlife,” he was fond of saying. “You never know what’s gonna happen.” But like a lot of things with Dre, this was just talk.

Soon Dre ordered an espresso, as he always did, before inviting his guests upstairs to the nightclub. “Girls, what do you say we go upstairs for the party?”

Jenna, an unemployed blonde in her twenties searching for a job in finance, stood up with a sigh, and under her breath she mumbled, “Let’s go dance for our dinner.” Jenna rarely went out—she had met Dre a year earlier, when he had noticed the pretty college student on the street and stopped to introduce himself. Jenna didn’t have many college friends, and she found Dre to be an interesting character, whom she would eventually consider a friend. Dre convinced her to come to the Downtown tonight to have a nice dinner for free. “You never know who you might meet,” he said to her, a standard enticement among promoters to get a woman to come out with them. Jenna agreed, hoping to meet someone in finance that could help with her post-college job search.

The club upstairs was small and intimate like the restaurant, but darker, louder, and drunker. We repositioned ourselves around a banquette, a long, curved sofa adjacent to two small low tables brimming with bottles of Perrier-Jouët champagne, Belvedere vodka, carafes of orange juice and cranberry juice in silver ice buckets, and neat little stacks of glass tumblers. The table is right next to the DJ booth, where Dre played emcee to his weekly karaoke party. From 12 to 3 a.m., he sang, danced, and cajoled others to do the same, all to ensure the party had a good vibe. As the evening went on, the room turned sweltering hot, as more and more people crowded around the small tables. Women in high heels grew even taller as they perched on top of the sofas, and Dre poured bottomless glasses of champagne and vodka from his table. Models sang Russian pop songs and laughed, businessmen unbuttoned their tailored Italian dress shirts and pulled down their suspenders, and Dre wrestled the mic from an overly drunk “Brazillionaire.” Through it all, people jumped up and down to the music. This was the Downtown’s famed Sunday night party that Dre made happen every week.

While Dre was paid well for the night’s work, his female guests, here and elsewhere, were not paid.³ Instead they were comped in two senses of the word, with freebies of food and drinks, and with the compliment of being included in an exclusive world that did not otherwise welcome people with mediocre status or money, and that prized good looks. Most of the “girls” understood these terms of exchange, as I would learn in interviews with them, though they rarely discussed them when they were out.

Meanwhile, VIP establishments like the Downtown generate large profits. The Downtown is part of a global chain of restaurants in Manhattan, London, Hong Kong, and Dubai that pulls in well over $100 million a year. That’s small change, however, compared to the fortunes of the Saudi princes, Russian oligarchs, and run-of-the-mill tech and finance giants who buy bottles here and at other exclusive clubs around the world.

“There’s so much money in this room,” Dre told me, smiling and shaking his head. He often gestured to me to take notice when a sparkler-lit bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne floated by, held high above the head of a scantily clad waitress. Each one cost about $495.

The bottle buyers were men from the global economic elite. A notoriously difficult population to study and even define, the “elite” here refers to people who command demonstrably large economic resources, irrespective of their influence or political power.⁴ The VIP party circuit appeals to mostly young and new money for whom a $495 bottle at the Downtown is the equivalent of a Starbucks coffee for someone like middle-class Jenna, who was now standing nearby Dre’s table, swaying listlessly to the music, eyes scanning the room. Like most of Dre’s girls, she usually stayed close to his table and only occasionally mingled about the room. After an hour, she left, not having found any job opportunities amid the loud music and flashing lights.

Everyone in this room has power. Some of it is fleeting—like women’s beauty, a short-lived asset that gets them into the room, but not recognition as s...