Sublime

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

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.

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.

Because in this rarefied world there is an unspoken but widely understood logic: girls are valuable; women are not.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In short, promoters show us that exploitation works best when it feels good.