’No HR department’: Late nights with Sydney’s 24-hour party people

While most Aussies are slumped on the couch watching The Block, these Insta stars spend their weeknights out on the town.

Living for the weekend is over. Now, it’s all about living for the midweek.

“I just don’t sleep sometimes,” Instagram identity @TomGayUSA says at the Bar Lulu launch in Sydney.

It’s a Wednesday night and he’s out enjoying another evening of free cocktails along with hundreds of other social media personalities on the top floor of the hip Luna Lu restaurant as the Harbour Bridge swoops overhead in The Rocks. “It never stops.”

“I’ve been to three events today,” says Suzan Mutesi, an influencer who proudly boasts about her 1.2 million Instagram followers.

Her day started with a breakfast to celebrate the launch of a new skincare product and segued into a boat party for a candle company. Upon returning to shore, she hightailed it to Bar Lulu for a night of partying and posting. Tomorrow is a launch celebrating a well-known alcohol brand.

“Sometimes, you could do eight events a week,” she says, escaping the rain and finding warmth under an outdoor heater.

Welcome to the after-dark reality show that’s playing out in the real-ish world of Sydney’s weeknight event circuit. The cast? TV contestants of yore and social media influencers, all documenting their antics at invite-only PR functions.

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Their iPhone calendars are filled with openings for bars and restaurants. Launches for booze companies, fashion labels and make-up brands. And parties for the sake of partying. After two years of lockdowns, the city’s clubs are replenishing and so are our Instagram feeds.

For some, partying is a full-time job. For others, they’re working towards it.

“I’m a fashionista,” @LookLikeLuka says, proudly posing to show off his Alexander McQueen ensemble and blue purse.

He taps away on the screen of an iPhone to find his Instagram profile, which has gathered more than 34,000 followers. Every week, he finds time to squeeze in three or four events around his day job as a visual merchandiser for a department store.

Isaias Vego and @LookLikeLuka can regularly be spotted on the midweek party scene.

‘I’m tall and love my hair,’ says Isaias Vego, pictured with @LookLikeLuka.

‘There’s no HR department,’ says Insta identity @TomGayUSA (pictured with Suzan Mutesi) about the party circuit.

Getting on the scene as an influencer at events had long been a dream of Luka’s but he wasn’t having much success. Then fellow Instagram identity Tati Baumjohann stepped in to help.

“She has 150,000 followers,” Luka says in awe.

Tati – a 39-year-old Brazilian mum of two and soccer WAG – now acts as his mentor, paying it forward in the Instagram community. She says Luka’s big problem was he was trying too hard with his feed. She encouraged him to forget about perfection and to just post every day. She also revamped his handle, consulting a brains trust of social media experts. Before, it was @LookAtMe. Now, it's @LookLikeLuka. The smallest detail can make or break an influencer.

Armed with his new handle, he went to his first event – a party for an Australian wine brand in the posh Sydney suburb of Rose Bay. The rest is history, comprehensively documented and archived in a neat social media grid.

Across the bar, a contestant from one of the iterations of The Bachelor mingles while trays of truffled mushroom spring roll canapes circulate. @LookLikeLuka gets tasked with filming videos and taking photos for Tati, who strikes a series of poses.

“Glamorous! Something different, girls! Sexy! Beautiful faces,” Luka screams as he whirls around her with his iPhone.

Fellow partygoer Isaias Vego joins the improv paparazzi. He has a yen for bold suits and wearing sunglasses indoors.

“I’m into modelling. I’m tall and love my hair,” he later explains.

Their diaries are all marked with two big parties tomorrow: one for the launch of a new lingerie line, and a party for liqueur brand Tia Maria.

Two icons: Isaias Vego parties with the Sydney Opera House in the background at the Bar Lulu launch.

All in a week: Suzan Mutesi poses up a storm at a Byron event, glams up for a Tommy Hilfiger bash, and battles the wind on the deck of the Ecoya boat party before heading to Bar Lulu.

Nasser Sultan regularly brings the drama to midweek events around Sydney.

“Tomorrow night and Friday night, they’re back-to-back events, so sometimes they do clash and sometimes you have to leave one and go to another one,” @TomGayUSA, 30, explains of the overlapping festivities. “It’s a place to be seen. And as long as you’re seen, you get your face out there – and people start recognising you.”

This week, he has five parties to attend. The scene is still only new to the Ohio native. Covid interrupted his stint in Australia but ultimately led to him ramping up his presence on Instagram and the party circuit.

There was an appearance in ads for a phone company (“I was the face of Telstra”) and he has explored several side hustles. One venture has something to do with silent disco headphones. Then there's “the world’s largest inflatable theme park”, which he manages.

Somewhere amid all this, he’s also an actor. He lists the latest Thor instalment in the bio of his Instagram, which has 10,600 followers.

“There’s a scene where Natalie Portman is just getting ready to steal Thor’s hammer and I am the main focus in the very centre of the scene, probably for a good 20 seconds,” he says.

@TomGayUSA lives a movie star life on the red carpet with influencer Merisa Chandra.

Parties like this are the workplace of the digital age and influencers are punching the clock. An open cocktail bar is the water cooler at which office drama is gossiped about.

“There’s no Human Resource department to stop anything,” @TomGayUSA says.

And because of this, office politics can explode at any second.

“There’s a lot of jealous people,” Suzan says.

“Mean. There’s a lot of meanness where people will sabotage you, talk trash about you." 

Later on, Nasser Sultan (a former Married At First Sight contestant and regular on the party circuit) will send around a DM declaring Suzan has bought her one million Instagram followers and shows up to events uninvited.

A venue that doesn’t require an invite is Frankie’s Pizza – a late-night rock ‘n’ roll bar in the middle of Sydney, serving up hair metal and hot slices until the early hours. Girls who look like they just walked off the set of a Kiss video clip stand alongside white middle-aged guys in bad business suits.

This is where Suzan, her Plus One Dylan Mahoney (an actor-model) and @TomGayUSA have kicked on after Bar Lulu. It’s past midnight and the boys don’t have anywhere to be in the morning. Suze has a 10am consult at a cosmetics clinic that wants to offer free procedures in exchange for Instagram endorsements.

Even in the dark booth of the basement bar, @TomGayUSA — sipping the establishment’s signature brew of whisky and apple juice — is being recognised.

“Oh my god! You’re @TomGayUSA!” a girl yells over the band’s cover of the Ramones’ Blitzkrieg Bop.

She’s more than familiar with him. He enthusiastically bluffs recognition.

“Sometimes you’ve just gotta pretend that you know them,” he says later while talking about the same-same faces that approach him at events and in the outside world. “No one wants to be forgotten. No one wants to be unseen. That’s the respect from an influencer.”

Then one of the hair metal groupies stumbles past the table and knocks several glasses of whisky and apple juice over the pizzas.

@TomGayUSA pictured partying with @LookLikeLuka — turning lemon wedges into lemonade.

@LookLikeLuka dances the weeknight away.

The next night, as everyone else is picking the perfect Plus One and choosing an even more perfect outfit to fit the green and black theme for the Tia Maria party, Suzan is laid up at home. The consult at the cosmetics clinic ended up being an actual procedure worth $5000 and now her chin is swollen.

But her absence from the social scene is just a blip. By Sunday, she’ll be back on the red carpet at the Royal Theatre for a premiere before jetting out to Byron Bay on Monday with a small group of influencers to promote a cosmetics brand. On Wednesday, she’ll be back in Sydney at an InStyle magazine event followed by a party for Hermes.

“Love me, love me, say that you love me,” begs The Cardigans singer Nina Persson as the band’s 1996 hit Love Fool plays over the speakers between DJ sets from Client Liaison.

Influencers, abiding by the green and black dress code, are packed into Noir nightclub and forming a mosh pit around the bar to get their hands on the free martinis and negronis, spiked with Tia Maria.

There’s @LookLikeLuka. And there’s Isaias, with his sunglasses on. Nearby, fellow influencer Merisa Chandra dances with Tati while her Plus One – a professional photographer she has brought with her to document the evening like a one-woman reality TV crew – films them.

They’ve just come from the lingerie launch at Solera Bar. Mel Lucarelli, a former reality star and fledgling influencer, is running late between both events. She has also lost her voice after last night's party at Bar Lulu.

“It was a pretty big night,” she confesses when she arrives.

“It gets exhausting.”

Tati dances with Merisa and her one-woman reality TV crew.

Merisa parties with influencer Bhavninder Sanghera and Insta model Rosangela Fasano at the Nia and Rose launch.

@TomGayUSA, Isaias Vego, Tati and @LookLikeLuka commit to the Tia Maria dress code of green and black.

Merisa and Tati working overtime to get that content.

There’s no office job for Mel to show up to in the morning. During the pandemic, her Instagram took off. She says she now pays the bills with content creation on social media. And going out to midweek parties for product launches - something she started doing after appearing as a contestant on the extreme dating reality show Married At First Sight three years ago - helps keep her name and face out there. She says she couldn’t go back to working a normal day job.

“I’m not a nine-to-five office person.”

After back-to-back weeknights on the events circuit, what happens when the weekend comes? The high is followed by the crash.

“All the time,” Mel says of the lull that kicks in on a quiet night in. “When you’re at an event, you’re just, ‘woo-woo-woo!’ – having so much fun. But because there’s so many (parties) on right now, there hasn’t been that much down time because you’ve gotta start getting ready for the next one. And it is a lot of work.”

@TomGayUSA has entered the bar. He’s also running late and the party’s almost over. He strolls through the club, slapping hands with random people, and makes his way to the almost-empty dance floor, which he bursts onto as if the room has been waiting just for him. He has to be up at 9am to do work for the world’s largest inflatable theme park, but that’s not tonight’s problem.

“When you’re an influencer, how do you make it up to people when you’re late?” he muses later, while walking down Oxford Street to find the next bar when the party ends after midnight. “You’ve gotta come in twice as hard. You’ve gotta save face.”

Twitter, Facebook: @hellojamesweir