Sublime

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

“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

VIP treating has expanded as a system to subsidize the fashion industry’s low wages and to capitalize on models’ unusual position as, on the one hand, a precarious labor force and, on the other, a highly valuable commodity.

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 perform emotional and physical labors that mirror what sociologists have termed “aesthetic labor,” common in the service industries. Flight attendants, retail workers, waiters—pretty much anyone in service has to “look good and sound right” according to their company’s brand identity.

A promoter seeks girls for whom all three motivations align: if she needs subsidized meals, if she is loyal to his friendship, and if she genuinely enjoys whatever fun can be shared in during the night, she will likely become a regular presence at his table.

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.”