Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

by Ashley mears

First, subject. And then, style. 

These two concepts create the heart of pop non-fiction books. Broadly, this works for all entertainment: I like the Elder Scrolls games more than the Fallout games after they adopted the same game engine solely because fantasy is more appealing to me than post-apocalypse. But Fallout New Vegas is still my favorite of the first-person-perspective open-world Bethesda games, because the way it presents itself overcomes the setting. I am reminded of the moment when I realized that all New Yorker Magazine articles are worth reading, regardless of subject matter, because the editing was so powerful that the pages would always be enjoyable. The changing diets of Polar bears? Sure, why not. Coverage of a revival of Hamlet, but performed by cats (prrformed?)? Let’s see where this goes.

The last subscription issue I received. I miss you sometimes, NYer.

I spilled some paint on my copy of this. But I still have it.

Magazine articles are a completely different beast than a game or a full-length book, though. Can I commit myself to a dozen or so hours immersed in fancy bars and jet-setting when my idea of fun times are runs, either of the long-distance trail or videogame speed varieties?

Cranking the subject/style balance slider to eleven one way or the other might work: if your style is strong enough it, like the extremely polished foundationally erudite structure of The New Yorker, you may be able to pull it off. But for a subject to drag you through something tediously constructed, you probably need to already be really interested in what it is dissecting. This might explain why I saw a nearly six-hour runtime on a Tokimeki Memorial analysis and thought to myself, “Why, this is a reasonable amount of time. I, for one, might even wish for it to be a bit longer.” (Not that it is tediously constructed, but six hours watching a YouTube video is a big ask, no matter the context.)

So it may be far easier to pitch a balanced approached to the subject/style factors. Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit is not a six-hour video: it is not a dense tome containing endless pages. Which is probably the right choice for a subject matter that might not engender the same zeal as the hobbyist, pseudoacademic retrospective navel-gazing something like an unavailable-in-English foundational adventure/dating game from the early 1990s would amongst the video game cognescenti. It has interviews with people like meme-candidate Sam, a 33yr old hedge fund manager living the hedge fund manager life that anyone voluntarily picking up a sociological examination of the gliterrati club scene holds as the stereotype for his ilk in their mind:

“It’s disgusting, kind of. I thought about this before, like is this wrong? Is this a bad use of money? And it don’t think it is, because it’s money spent that creates a lot of good. The money’s not better spent on, like, welfare; I mean I just told you I love Charles Murray”—the social scientist known for his racially charged critiques of social welfare, widely embraced by conservatives—“but really it’s money that’s going back into the economy….and I don’t think it’s better to just give that money, like, to a homeless person or anything. So when I say it’s disgusting, I’m not approaching it from the lens of ‘Let’s feed the starving babies.’

“The reason is because it’s meant to show. It’s the status aspect that is disgusting. They’re doing ti for the sake of being seen. And it’s for the attention and fanfare and that’s why everyone photographs is and posts pictures of it. That’s the part of it that I could not stand.” Implicitly, then, Same did not object to large sums being spent of status objects; rather, the deliberate performance of that status bothered him. The display of wealth, to rich people like Sam, is a violation of decorum.

For my money, VIP continues to reinforce what I already believe about this moneyed class of the working elite:

Despite securing his enviable hedge fund job at his family’s firm after having just graduated from an unexceptional college, Ricardo insisted and seemed to genuinely believe that his income reflected his hard work. He, like other clients that I spoke to, portrayed himself as deserving occasional indulgences. That was a common trope.

These quotes represent the substance, which appealed to me in the way that most examples of time spent living life in NYC do. Bonus points from me, too, because I like a book that can take what some might see as a ‘silly subject’ and take it seriously. The academic rigor behind a nonsense phrase like “Former New York club owner Steve Lewis told me that “‘only really sophisticated people can tell the difference between models and hot girls’,” removes any feeling that this might be—and I can’t think of a better way to put this—“icky,” or overly effusive toward the well-connect, the rich, the glamorous.

Other examples of the seriousness with which VIP’s style takes its substance is in delineating specific terms. Both “model” and “hot girl” are terms of art in this context, specifically defined and denoted. The distinction of the socioeconomic stratums aren’t defined by the standard “whales” and “minnows,” but by “lettuce”:

Their [the clubs] target clients are affluent city residents, tourists, and visiting businessmen who are a reliable presence night after night. These regulars spend relatively modest but consistent sums. “It’s like making a salad,” continued the club owner. “What’s the most important ingredient, the biggest ingredient in a salad? Lettuce. That’s our affluent New Yorkers, guys with small bills of three to five thousand.”

Much like you need to be “above 5’9” and under 6 feet” to be considered a model, you need to know what words will be used and how in each specific frame of reference. But it never moves too fast, or assumes you come into the pages knowing exactly what a high-end club looks, sounds, or feels like. The book never punishes you for being outside, looking in: in fact, it is presented from the liminal space between inside and outside the scene. As both erstwhile model and active sociologist, the author is in the field, participating without disrupting; an important facet of why the book works as well as it does. As reader, you never feel left outside the velvet ropes so the author can flex their intellectual fortitude:

This became more clear to Eleanor when she wanted to invite some of her plain-looking girlfriends from her New Jersey hometown to come out with them one night, and Zach refused. “It’s like they don’t even want to be seen with people that aren’t attractive,” she said. “It’s—it’s gross.” 

And yet, Eleanor continued to hang out with Zach and other rich men so that she could afford her taste for upscale entertainment.

VIP is not Eleanor: if you can’t come with, the book isn’t going to go. There are two times I can vividly recall feeling undereducated. Not stupid, not exactly, but just ignorant. The first, when my AP English teacher made an oblique reference to Guernica.

And when absolutely no one in class could even say what medium Guernica was—book, play, human being, song?—she upbraided us for being rubes. Deserved, I suppose (or at least internalized).

The second was during what I thought would be a blow-off class in college, Science Fiction. I was (am) a big ol’ fantasy nerd and at that point in my life I didn’t realize the conflation of Scifi and Fantasy as genres was based on bookstore marketing layouts rather than literary merit, so I jumped in with all the confidence of a farmboy drafted into a small galactic rebellion.

The first book we were assigned was a huge and tedious slog through some crumbling Space Empire that didn’t contain magical laser knights. The professor opened class by asking what the major historical influence was, based mostly on the structural conceits. At least three hands shot up, and the response of “Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” dropped my confidence like a womp rat bullseyed with a t16 back home. Should I have known who Gibbon was, as a nineteen-year-old? I got Guernica’d again.

Both those moments surfaced during VIP; I thought I knew enough about Manhattanite hospitality culture from my time in film production, but what I touched was surface level at best. However, I never walked away from the pages here feeling worse than when started. Its style continues to offer up the type of cited and interesting facts that I want from non-fiction, and the background info comes up naturally, never front-loaded or clunky:

The term “girl” came into popular usage in England in the 1880s to describe working-class unmarried women who occupied an emerging social space between childhood and adulthood. Not quite a child, she was childlike in that she had yet to become a wife or mother, the type of modern urbanite who engaged in “frivolous” pursuits like consumption, leisure, romance, and fashion. The idea and imagery of the girl spread from England to the rest of the world through popular figures like the “shopgirl” in newly opening department stores, the flapper—the original “It Girl” in America—and “chorus girls,” those young female stage performers who danced in unison on stage. In these display roles, women found little longevity. One news report about a successful New York dancer in 1929 noted, “At twenty-one, she is through, as far as Broadway i[s] concerned.”

Not that I’m spotchecking, but Drunk Tank Pink has forced me to followup sometimes on citations. Okay, so I guess that is spotchecking. But VIP, with hundreds of citations, never once let me down; Everywhere I ended was a scholarly article, a NY Times piece, or an attributable direct quote. Big index. Big endnotes.

It’s a good book. It reads well. I just can’t mentally circumscribe the reader that would find VIP interesting. I certainly did, but after I finished the book I felt more like I’d had my suppositions about nightlife verified rather than having learned a whole host of big facts about a new subculture. Would people that didn’t spend five years of their life working in SoHo—walking past casting agencies and model bars and the very streets of NYC referenced within—close the book so unchanged by the pages? I greatly appreciate having what I saw explained to me in a clear and professional manner:

Rituals of sacrifice, war, gladiator games, monuments, and, today, luxury retail, casinos, and nightclubs are shows of waste that are constitutive of social life; they share our dreams and desires, and they merit careful attention.

I would never recommend avoiding VIP. But with endless ways spend your time, something about the subject needs to call out to you. Do you want context for “bottles & models,” or are you happy to leave the structures underpinning global nightlife a vague pastiche of TV-drama shorthand and fin-de-siècle capital signifiers? If you pick up VIP, it should be for the context it provides; the spotlight, here, is for once on the supporting cast. Not the spectacle.