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

Thanks to taste regimes, we get more joy out of the everyday. We also adopt a new mechanism for social distinction and status signaling. A taste regime provides social links and holds a taste community together, and sets apart one taste community from another.

Not as straightforward as loyalty programs, membership trades on social and cultural capital. Scoring an invite for the Château de Saran, the centerpiece of the Moët Chandon empire, doesn’t have a price: “you cannot pay to come and stay at Saran, that is not the point. You have to be asked,” says Stephane Baschiera, the president and CEO of Moët an

We were lucky, I thought, dissociating, to even be able to indulge these awful priorities, to have the economic capital to be able to accrue more social capital via our looks. And then our looks, in some way, would help us guard and acquire economic capital—this was the

If we return to the opposition of “value” versus “values” laid out in the last chapter, we might put it this way: if you just want to make a lot of money, there might be a way to do it; on the other hand, if your aim is to pursue any other sort of value—whether that be truth (journalism, academia), beauty (the art world, publishing), justice (activ