Wild sex, drugs and naked girls: insider blows lid on VIP parties
Model Ashley Mears peels back the curtain on the international party scene and finds a seething hot bed of lust and waste.
Even in horn-rimmed spectacles and with her stick-straight hair haphazardly pinned in a chignon, Boston University superwonk Ashley Mears still looks like the New York Fashion Week model she was at the turn of this century: long-throated and impossibly gracile, faculty gravitas be damned.
She’s the James Bond of the ethnographic set, a spy in silk and ankle-tie Manolos infiltrating the ancient citadels of male privilege to emerge triumphant with their scalps.
Far from cosmetic, professor (of sociology) Mears’s beauty is a prerequisite of her research. Without it, she would never have clinked cucumber mint martinis with the models of Manhattan and “transient super-rich” she anatomises in her second carnal ethnography, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit. This follows her first book, Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model, published in 2011.
In these rarefied “beauty economies”, the standard tertiary education nerd wouldn’t make it past the gilded ropes. Mears quotes what one doorman said to one man of his guest: “[W]hat the f..k is this shit? Don’t bring this fat f..king girl here.”
At the vanguard of the new wave of ethnographic miniaturists – in the late sixties, ethnographers were elbowed aside in preference for demographers and quantitative analysis – Mears, once the Louboutins are surrendered, is all about the intersection of gendered aesthetics, labour and the economy.
Following the global party circuit from 2011 to 2013 with elite nightclub promoters and their unpaid litters of catwalk newbies (no one wants a grown-up model who knows her value), she maps out – with an excruciatingly delicious lack of charity – the normalisation of ostentation “in the context of extreme wealth concentration”.
She brings it all to the boil with a simple equation: like most imperialists throughout history, 21st-century potentates consolidate their power in the eyes of men with the “ownership of women”.
Mears discovered that despite the blatant exploitation of these beautiful “girls” — who remain unpaid, emotionally exploited for the inflation of male status, disrespected and easily discarded — the male promoters, club owners and clients uniformly despise those motivated by money, referring to them as “whores” and “users”.
The ones who accept petits cadeaux such as flights, hotel rooms and haute couture are merely derided as “soft hookers”. The others are, by men, verbally programmed to feel grateful for the opportunity to be part of the proceedings.
Mears writes: “Men’s dominance seeped into every aspect of VIP club culture, including the ways men talked about women as prey to be conquered, or as objects to be collected.”
The whales – big spenders — at every exclusive nightclub are, as Mears found, invariably heterosexual men, the “Saudi princes, Russian oligarchs, and run-of-the-mill tech and finance giants” to whom a $US495 sparkler-infused bottle of Dom Pérignon is the equivalent of a Starbucks coffee.
This is a world in which bankers pay $US50,000 to $US100,000 to rent a villa for the weekend, and $US30,000 in nightclub “table rent” per night. The parties with P. Diddy, the coke on the Côte d’Azur, the harem: the script is adhered to with zeal.
As Mears points out, the “superrich” – or top 0.1 per cent of American families - now own approximately the same share of wealth as the entirety of the bottom 90 per cent.
Rap and hip-hop in particular cranked these extravagantly insecure shows of consumption into an epidemic. Mears writes that even during and following the Global Financial Crisis, “displays of excess and ostentation continued among the world’s superrich, for whom the recession had little effect on luxury spending”.
Before refilling her glass, a promoter assures Mears: “We are fine. There’s no recession.” The American unemployment rate at the time was 10 per cent.
White boys with dreads and bling, naked “girls” at villas pumping trance in Spain: nouveau riche tryhards, particularly in the music industry, flaunt their downtime – sex, drugs and leisure – in an effort to create the illusion that they don’t have to work.
Love and happiness play no part in their ambitions. Their efforts centre exclusively – and mindlessly — on the generation of masculine approval.
Leisure class displays generally amount to competitive demonstrations of wealth (“pecuniary emulation”). Underlying this extravagance are “deep anxieties about the uncertainty of their status” relating to the aristocracy.
Mears cites American economist Thorstein Veblen’s observation that “a high-class wife has delicate hands and impractical dress to indicate that she is both useless and expensive, a testament to her husband’s success”.
Romance is similarly “conspicuously absent” among the models’ stated motivations for partying with such men. For one, they’re mostly broke. Others are driven by a lust for narcissistic supply (“models in New York City are, like … I’m not gonna say they’re like the royals of England, but … the praise they get, is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my life”).
The models themselves, Mears writes, possess “symbolic capital” in the field, a particular kind of power insiders immediately recognise: their role is to elevate “the status of a space”.
As a white, 27-year-old French promoter explains: “It is the quality of the woman. It’s the perfect thing. It’s just so beautiful to see and watch. A model is a model. She goes into a club, and she’s, like, flashlight. She’s here, you know. And the guys next to her, they’ll be like, ‘Damn, this club is hot. Get me another bottle’.” They are, in short, women who shift units for men.
Their mandate is merely to look wealthy. Over the course of the 18 or so months required to research the book in bars, restaurants, clubs and at parties, Mears was never asked to pay for anything. “As ‘girls,’ our drinks and meals were comped; the endless plates and glasses came to us ‘compliments of the house’.”
Promoters, who tip wait staff 25 per cent of the bill, cultivate impoverished young models, treating them to lunch, driving them to castings, taking them to movies, helping them move: ostensibly kind gestures. “But after a few months of watching how they work,” Mears notes, “I came to see these gestures as part of their craft.”
For the most part, the hypergamy – “marrying up” — popular in classic romcoms such as Pretty Woman is a myth. Mears reports that research “on assortative mating shows that homogamy is actually more common”.
Perceived by the players as fundamentally generic, the models, in the end, are no more than “buffers”: anonymous girls in Brazilian bikinis flanking permatanned rich guys on yachts in Saint-Tropez, women who can be purchased for a flight ticket and a weekend of champagne.
Even the powerbrokers who play sexual pick’n’mix each week are invariably left feeling as ratchety as junk bonds (“You don’t even know the name of the girl in your bed. You just want her to leave … The only thing you can do is brag to your friends”).
One divorced, middle-aged “superrich” player with a “palatial vacation home” was allegedly waiting for “the right woman to walk through the door at one of his parties”. In the interim, he traded in the usual currency: “the sexually charged company of a lot of girls.” His 47-year-old friend, a party fixture, “used girls to climb up the ranks of elite business circles”.
This relationship — that of wastage to elites — is of particular interest to Mears, who observed the one per cent’s ritualistic “valorisation of waste”. Included in this conspicuous squandering: hundreds of thousands of dollars in the form of champagne sprayed into the air, buying hundreds of bottles of wine, paying for all the drugs, engaging in perfunctory sex with multiple women whose faces are seen as secondary to their bodies, and so on. In essence, a tragedy. The global wastage not only of resources but of hearts, minds, and, ultimately, lives.
“Rituals of sacrifice, war, gladiator games” are, Mears writes, “shows of waste that are … at the heart of hierarchical systems of prestige and masculine domination.” The same principle applies to the superabundance of alpha femininity: “cool” continues to pivot on the affected – or actual - indifference to excess.
Fascinating and grotesque in equal parts, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit, like Mears, packs an unexpected punch. Best of all? Not one of them saw her coming.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke’s new book, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine, will be published in 2021.
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