Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
Like other promoters, Thibault and Felipe questioned the intrinsic beauty of fashion models while wholeheartedly embracing their economic value.
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
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.
Ashley Mears • 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.
Ashley Mears • Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
In paying for wildly inflated prices on alcohol, clients buy the invisibility of the labor it took to bring girls to them; they pay to not have to bring girls themselves, or to pay a broker outright to procure girls. They are buying, in part, the illusion of spontaneity.
Ashley Mears • Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
Whereas most male promoters relied on their flirtatious charm to attract women to come out with them, women became promoters if they were well positioned within valuable social networks of girls.
Ashley Mears • Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
Sharing moments of leisure and the illusion of friendly relations with clients—thereby denying the economic importance of those friendships—put the promoter in a difficult position. It set up asymmetrical expectations between the two parties: clients expected fun and short-term contact, while promoters expected long-term ties with economic-mobility
... See moreAshley 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.
Ashley Mears • Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
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.