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

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.

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

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

takes an incredible amount of labor to enable conspicuous leisure, and this labor upholds a gendered economy of value in which women’s bodies are assessed against men’s money. Bottle trains of champagne may seem irrational to a modern economist, but to an economic sociologist they are a type of ritual performance at the heart of hierarchical system

Sex between girls and clients is not the main point of having so many models in attendance; rather, it is the visibility of sexiness in excess that produces status. A high quantity of girls is visual testimony to the client’s importance; it enables him to show off an excess of beauty. The display of so many girls’ bodies is parallel to the displays

Girls may have abundant riches in the form of bodily capital, but their capacity to spend it is limited by gendered rules of sexual conduct.

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.

“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

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.