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

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

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.

With shopgirls, department stores could harness what historian Peter Bailey termed, in his history of Victorian sexual culture, parasexuality. Writing about bar maidens, Bailey conceptualized parasexuality as feminine sexuality that is “deployed but not fully released.”

The Hamptons has been a destination for rich New Yorkers since the late nineteenth century, when the city’s old moneyed aristocrats and newly minted tycoons transformed the quiet farmland and saltboxes into a summer colony of mansions for high society.

collective effervescence, an intense social experience understood as a social emotion, the excitement that comes from feeling close—both physically and emotionally—to others.

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

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

“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 “ownership of women,” noted Veblen over a century ago, is one of the most prominent means for men to conspicuously display their status, a gendered relation of power that continues to govern the VIP scene and beyond.