We\u2019ve all seen scenes like this on Instagram or the pages of glossy magazines. Over the last few decades, a new elite has emerged, partly as a result of deregulation of the financial sector in the West and partly because of the spread of global capitalism across the world. This elite is more geographically dispersed and mobile than the aristocrats and capitalists of yesteryear. And an industry has sprung up to feed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A small cohort of oligarchs, New York hedge-fund managers and Silicon Valley investors now patronise a network of nightclubs that span the globe. Whether they\u2019re in Miami or St Tropez these clubs tend to have similar decor and the same clientele. The coronavirus pandemic has temporarily paused the partying, but you can be sure that this sector of society, locked down in large homes and insulated from the economic recession, will soon be up for a good time again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The visual tropes of this world are familiar even to non-vips: angular cheekbones, Louboutin heels, sprays of champagne. What most people don\u2019t realise is that the apparently spontaneous abandon of those extravagant nights is, in fact, painstakingly planned. It takes a carefully hidden, intricate economy, based on a complex brokering of beauty and status, to create an atmosphere in which people will spend $100,000 on alcohol in a single night. This economy\u2019s currency is young women. The leggy blondes who surrounded the millionaire that night in Miami were not there by chance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I went behind the scenes in this world between 2010 and 2014, trying to establish how it worked. Because I was a model before I became a sociologist, I was able to enter roped-off areas that ruthlessly exclude any woman who does not conform to a certain body type. I talked to the young women who surrounded the millionaires and came to understand that, whether they fully acknowledged it or not, they were being managed: shunted in and out of nightclubs with brisk efficiency. Women in this world were living props in a carefully scripted theatre that created real financial value for men \u2013 the promoters who set up the scene, the nightclub-owners who raked in the bar bills, the wannabe billionaires who used the environment to network. The women\u2019s motivation was harder to pinpoint. But every night they gamely donned their heels and hit the clubs. The show had to go on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dre was a promoter for some of the biggest clubs on the vip circuit (like others in this story he asked me to use a pseudonym). He was a handsome 38-year-old with a shaved head and dazzling smile, whose job was to encourage big spenders to book tables at the clubs he worked for. He achieved this partly through his own charisma. He\u2019d dabbled in the music business before becoming a promoter (at a certain point in the night he performed an unforgettable rendition of Michael Jackson\u2019s \u201cBilly Jean\u201d), and was the kind of person celebrities liked to greet on a night out. But Dre\u2019s main talent was his ability to bring in models, ideally at least five a night (other promoters aimed for ten \u2013 it was important for there to be an excess of beauty). \u201cI know how to talk to girls,\u201d Dre often said. \u201cThey like me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Through spending a lot of time with Dre in New York, I learned the basic economics of the system that he worked so effectively. In some ways Dre\u2019s job resembled that of a pimp but, like every promoter, he flinched when I raised the idea. Some of the rich nightclub customers may have had sex with the beautiful women rustled up for them by promoters, though I didn\u2019t see much evidence of this (often the men hardly spoke to them). But fundamentally that was not the reason the women were there. The point of gathering a crowd of models was to put customers in the right kind of mood to spend money. Dre\u2019s ultimate client was the club-owner, who transformed that ambience into profit by inflating the price of the alcohol they bought by up to 1,000%. That mark-up included the invisible labour it took to summon the models. Customers paid so they didn\u2019t have to bring the women themselves or engage a broker to procure them. They paid for the illusion of spontaneity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dre had a gift for creating a relaxed atmosphere in fancy places. I watched him at work in a famous restaurant in SoHo, where the owner was paying him at least $1,000 a night to bring in the right crowd. He sat flanked by bottles and beautiful women, apparently kicking back but in reality watching the room like a hawk. \u201c\u00c7a va?\u201d he said as an acquaintance passed by in a sharp suit. Dre stood up to shake hands and chat. When he sat back down he whispered in my ear, \u201cThat guy\u2019s from a Saudi family. A billionaire.\u201d He winked to a woman sitting at the restaurant bar, supposedly the princess of a small country known for its offshore banks. As another man approached the table, Dre whispered, \u201cHe\u2019s really rich, his family. Really rich.\u201d Dre gave him a playful shoulder punch and fist bump. \u201cA girlfriend of mine asked if there are any hot guys here tonight,\u201d he said, followed by a calculated pause. \u201cI said \u2018yes\u2019 when I saw you walk in!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Clubs gave Dre and other promoters a nightly fee to bring in someone, almost always a man, willing to book a table and buy bottles of wine. Clubs usually gave the promoter a cut of the client\u2019s bar bill too, around 10-20%. It wasn\u2019t exactly easy money \u2013 the paternalistic relationship between promoters and models involves a lot of taxi fares, meals and gifts, totalling hundreds of dollars a day, and clubs are famously slow in processing payments. But in a good year, Dre took home $200,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Customers called Dre when they wanted to have a good time \u2013 in practical terms, a guaranteed table at the coolest club, surrounded by the best-looking women \u2013 and he wanted them to think of him as a friend. He was always on the hunt for wealthy men to add to his phone contacts, or, better still, a \u201cwhale\u201d. Whales, men willing to drop a house deposit\u2019s worth of cash in one night, were the most sought after prize of the vip nightclub economy. During my time on the scene, Jho Low, a Malaysian financier, was the biggest fish of all (Interpol later issued a red notice for his alleged role in a multibillion-dollar fraud.) \u201cHe spends $1m wherever he goes,\u201d one promoter told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These big beasts were rarely spotted. But the possibility that they might turn up was part of the appeal for the much larger number of clients in the tier of wealth below them. Most of Dre\u2019s business came from more run-of-the-mill bankers, tech developers and other high-earning professionals, whose bar bills were a fraction of the whales\u2019, but would still seem eye-watering to rest of us. One club-owner referred to this section of his clientele as \u201cthe lettuce\u201d: \u201cIt\u2019s like making a salad. What\u2019s the most important ingredient, the biggest ingredient? Lettuce. That\u2019s our affluent New Yorkers, guys with small bills of three to five thousand.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you were to ask most people what makes men spend thousands of dollars on alcohol in a single night, the answer would probably seem simple. Rich people like showing off and don\u2019t care about losing money. But even among the very rich there are taboos around gratuitous spending. The people I interviewed who frequented such bars, and spent these large sums, often used the same words to describe the rituals of nightclub extravagance: \u201cridiculous\u201d, \u201cstupid\u201d, \u201cwaste\u201d and \u201ccrazy\u201d. For the alchemy by which money is turned into status \u2013 to persuade people to break these taboos, in other words \u2013 there had to be the right audience. And that\u2019s why the models had to be there.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOne promoter explained the effect of these women to me. \u201cA model is a model. She goes into a club, and she\u2019s, like, flashlight. And the guys next to her, they\u2019ll be like, \u2018Damn, this club is hot. Get me another bottle.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To achieve this effect, the women brought in by the promoters either had to be models or have similar physical attributes: beauty, height and thinness. Non-models with the right appearance were sometimes part of the entourage, but they stood a notch lower down in the caste system, referred to as \u201cgood civilians\u201d. Unlike the waitresses, who tended to be more voluptuous, the job of the women the promoters brought in was not primarily to appeal to men\u2019s sexual fantasies but to represent the most aspirational version of femininity. Promoters told me in all seriousness that letting in women who were merely slim rather than thin could really damage a club\u2019s reputation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The spending sprees which the promoters\u2019 women stimulated were not necessarily motivated by a desire to impress them. I came to realise that such gestures were often directed at other rich male customers. One club-goer told me about a \u201cbottle Olympics\u201d between two customers from India and Pakistan that he witnessed one night, each striving to outdo the other in ordering rare bottles of champagne. A backdrop of beautiful women facilitated such primitive battles. Status is a sensitive thing. It exists only when an audience recognises it: it cannot be bought outright without a loss of status. This means that vip clubs have to construct an environment which makes status-seeking seem the by-product of a fun and spontaneous night out. \u201cEach night is a production,\u201d one promoter told me. \u201cIt\u2019s a show.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unlike the club-owners and promoters, the young women weren\u2019t getting any money for their work. Those I spoke to were at pains to dissociate themselves from any such arrangement, describing women who sought to monetise their attractiveness by hooking a rich boyfriend as \u201csluts\u201d or \u201cbitches\u201d. So why did they follow promoters like Dre into the clubs, night after night? Even after living among them for months, it took me time to work it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perks were clearly part of the answer. The women got free meals (albeit only when clients and promoters felt like eating), free champagne and free entry to the coolest clubs with the best djs. Modelling pays well at the top but not for the bulk of those on the catwalk. Many were from poorer countries such as the Czech Republic and Brazil, and didn\u2019t have the funds to pay for an elite lifestyle themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the juiciest perks was the annual trip to Miami. Every summer, rich New York party-goers relocate to Florida\u2019s coast, where New York clubs have satellite branches. Promoters will generally pay for models\u2019 travel and accommodation. I went one summer as part of a promoter\u2019s entourage to observe the scene, and met Katia, a 20-year-old Ukrainian model, who seemed to be thriving under the arrangement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When we were both back in New York, Katia and I drank cappuccinos at an open-air caf\u00e9 in SoHo and talked about our nights out. During our hour together her phone buzzed constantly with messages from promoters and club owners (a male passer-by also interrupted us to praise her beauty). Katia was going out almost every night to events organised by a promoter, which she explained in simple terms: \u201cI wanna have fun. I don\u2019t care about other people, like who is the client or whatever.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She didn\u2019t feel pressured to have sex with anyone, she said, but freely pursued it with men she found attractive, including promoters. She especially liked hooking up with male models. She had recently stopped co-operating with her regular promoter because he didn\u2019t bring enough \u201cmodel boys\u201d along to hold her interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Katia took what she could from the scene: sex with a promoter, smoking his pot on the beach, dining in fancy restaurants and the excitement of seeing where the night would take you. Yet she couldn\u2019t simply leave a club if she wasn\u2019t having fun, or when her feet hurt from the heels the promoter made her wear. She kept a credit card tucked in the back of her phone for emergencies, but she didn\u2019t have much money so she relied on promoters to get around. Katia looked back on the experience as an overwhelmingly positive one. \u201cIt was amazing, no?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet I wasn\u2019t totally convinced. The Miami experience seemed pretty exhausting, and Katia and the other women had little capacity to determine their own movements. Another model I met, Petra, had been taken to Miami by a different promoter for a client whom she described as a \u201cBrazilian mafia guy or whatever\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Petra had been put up in a penthouse with a group of women, but it turned out not to have any furniture, so they were moved to a bedroom inside the client\u2019s place. On the first night there, Petra\u2019s friend Rose felt ill during dinner and wanted to go back to rest. No one would take her, and since she didn\u2019t have a key to the flat, she had to wait outside the nightclub until the early morning when the clients had finished partying. Petra, meanwhile, felt she had no choice but to go into the club without her. \u201cI had to go there alone not knowing these people, and then I did feel like a piece of meat, like totally, I had to be fun\u2026so I was like, dancing, and laughing, and hating my life at the same time.\u201d She had no control over her own time: \u201cJust not being able to eat on time, you think that\u2019s ok, but when it happens, it\u2019s not,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most of the women I spoke to seemed to think that following promoters around would be valuable in the longer term, though this value was hard to measure. One benefit was cultural capital. Getting access to the kind of circles where you might find a serious investor, for example, is almost impossible if you don\u2019t display the right markers of education and upbringing. Young women who weren\u2019t born into the elite appreciated the fact that, by hanging out in vip areas, they were able to hear what books or news stories rich people were talking about, and recognise high-end brands, food and wines. Learning the codes of elite consumer culture, they reckoned, was important, even if they were vague on how it might be of practical use. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine that it wouldn\u2019t be,\u201d said one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One woman told me that she started eating with her fork in her left hand after dining with Europeans. Another model, Reba, said she realised that wealthy women didn\u2019t wear as much make-up as she tended to. She also enjoyed her conversations with the people she met in high-end clubs. \u201cHow else would I get to talk to a guy who started a venture-capital firm or whatever else? I\u2019m not gonna meet him out at a bar on the Lower East Side. I\u2019m just not.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Women also thought the social ties \u2013 the connections with successful men \u2013 would turn out to be valuable. Penny, a model and actor from London who went out with promoters regularly in New York, explained, \u201cYeah, I\u2019ve met like movie directors [and] stuff like that. And if you know them and keep in contact with them, it\u2019s a beneficial thing for you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDoes that actually work?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou never know,\u201d she replied.<\/p>\n\n\n\nYet the more I delved, the more I realised that there was also a basic psychological compulsion at work for many of the young women. As one put it: \u201cIt\u2019s fucking flattering.\u201d Being desired and given presents and experiences by powerful men that other women couldn\u2019t have because they weren\u2019t as beautiful, was in itself a buzz. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be judged by how I look, but in a sense I am happy to have, to see all this stuff, and to have this opportunity that other people wouldn\u2019t normally have,\u201d a model called Nora told me. \u201cYou do end up feeling like one of the elite. I know it sounds so stupid, but\u2026it\u2019s being able to hang out with friends and having someone tell you, \u2018You\u2019re beautiful,\u2019 so you don\u2019t have to pay for anything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I started this project, I imagined the promoters would be the villains of the story, manipulating young women for profit. As I watched them work, however, I came to see that this wasn\u2019t always a straightforwardly exploitative relationship. It was also hard not to be impressed by the sheer effort they put into it. An important reason that women went along to countless nightclubs to laugh, dance and drink was simply that the promoters were very skilled at making them want to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dre was a good example. He could be extremely transactional but he was also kind and reliable, and as time went on I found myself really wanting to see him succeed. After I finished my research I got pregnant: Dre came to my baby shower, and gave me a surprisingly practical gift of bibs and eating utensils. I was touched, though I also suspected he\u2019d been hoping to network with models there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dre\u2019s parents were from sub-Saharan Africa, and he\u2019d grown up in France before moving to Miami in his early 20s. He\u2019d come from a completely different world to the glamorous one inhabited by the super-rich, and he was aware that his access depended on his skill in managing relationships. He was on first-name terms with famous actors and musicians, and knew which of the models he ferried about had a crush on them. He also knew what kinds of women the powerful men at his tables liked to have around them. At one point he kept a handwritten list of their preferences. I continually shook hands with strangers while I was out with Dre, who seemed energised by the constant chit-chat and joking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Other promoters took an even more systematised approach to maintaining a supply of attractive women. Thibault had a three-strong team that had fine-tuned tactics for recruiting models from the reserves of the New York fashion industry. They knew which castings were going on, the seasonal patterns of modelling work, which model agents were switching jobs and when their birthdays were. Some models told me they\u2019d found jobs through Thibault\u2019s network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Good promoters strived to make their relationship with their female entourage feel authentic. During the day, they might treat women to generous lunches or drive them to castings in big SUVs. Some women described their connections with promoters as being like \u201cfamily\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Promoters also became romantically involved with the women: one described his tactic for bringing a new group of models under his wing as: \u201cYou find the popular girl \u2013 the most exciting popular girl in the apartment \u2013 and you fuck her.\u201d Above all, promoters didn\u2019t want women to see them as brokers or employers compensating them for labour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the reality is that promoters do manage young women\u2019s labour. They recruit, control and discipline them like a manager overseeing their workforce. Women are theoretically free to come and go as they please, but are made to feel ashamed if they want to bail on a night out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I experienced this myself when I tried to leave early from a dinner that a promoter-turned-club-owner had arranged for a client. \u201cWhoa, whoa, whoa. Are you doing a dine-and-dash?\u2026You can\u2019t just leave. You at least have to stay for dessert and coffee, not run out on the bill. You don\u2019t have to pay, of course, but you have to stay to the end. And it\u2019s New York, you know, so then you have to go downstairs, have a drink, stay a little.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some promoters I knew would use tricks to make it harder for a danced-out model to collect her belongings: checking in their coats at the cloakroom or putting their handbags under the banquette sofas on which everyone would end up dancing later in the night. They might not have been orthodox management techniques, but they worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ironically, the promoters\u2019 position in the vip ecosystem was closer to that of the young women they managed than anyone else, though few seemed to realise it. Like the women, most promoters dreamed about joining the club of the super-rich that they hovered around, but they were ultimately excluded from the money and status. They could only pretend to belong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dre was convinced that his connections with the elite would eventually earn him a big business deal. Every night out with him, every lunch, brought news of one of these almost-clinched projects: the limousine company, the film production, the tv show, and, of course, his music career, which was always just about to take off. One month he claimed he was raising capital for a tech firm because of his access to so many billionaires and investors. The next he was in discussions about a Serbian telecoms deal. But these never came to anything. Clients were happy to call him when they wanted to go out, but that didn\u2019t mean they took him seriously as a business partner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet Dre\u2019s vision of the future never dimmed. \u201cWhen I think about where I came from, and now I am going to be a millionaire,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s the American dream, my story.\u201d\u25a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This article has been adapted from \u201cVery Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit\u201d by Ashley Mears. Copyright \u00a9 2020 by Princeton University Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The nightclub pulsed in the Miami heat. Dancers waved glow sticks with neon letters spelling out \u201cF*** me I\u2019m famous\u201d. The millionaire was dressed in a black t-shirt and jeans, and would have been easy to miss if he hadn\u2019t been surrounded by a dozen tall, thin, beautiful women and waving a pink bottle of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"yoast_head":"\n
The Secret Economics of a VIP Party Nightclub Photos - TorontoNightclub.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.torontonightclub.com\/ca\/the-secret-economics-of-a-vip-party\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Secret Economics of a VIP Party Nightclub Photos - TorontoNightclub.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The nightclub pulsed in the Miami heat. Dancers waved glow sticks with neon letters spelling out \u201cF*** me I\u2019m famous\u201d. 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