Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit.

Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2020.

1 INTRODUCTION

Academics are not generally fashion models. Most of us look like we dressed in a charity shop, with
our eyes closed. One exception is Ashley Mears. Mears is a graduate of the University of Georgia and
New York University and is now a professor at Boston University.

I mention Mears’ looks because they are central to her research. Very Important People is her
second book. Her first, Pricing Beauty, was a participant observation study of the fashion industry.
She was able to do that research because she had worked between school and university as a
professional model. And the contacts she then made were the gatekeepers for her second project: a
study of the ultra high end international party circuit in New York, Miami, St Tropez, St Barts and a
few other resorts.

2 FINDINGS

2.1 Mears describes herself as an economic sociologist. In this study she is concerned to
describe and explain the work that goes in to creating the top end of the New York club scene. This is
a world where men will spend very big thousands of dollars to spend an evening surrounded by
beautiful women. Most of that money goes on ridiculously over-priced bottles of expensive alcohol.
People pay thousands of dollars to have large bottles of champagne brought to their tables by
waiters in a procession, with the trays lit up by sparklers. The biggest spenders (the ‘whales’) can
drop $100,000 in an evening.

2.2 Basic structure of the event. As Mears shows, what seems like a spontaneous party is
actually the product of a great deal of work and the key players are the party promoters whose job it
is to persuade 10 or so professional models (or lookalikes) to accompany them to a club where they
sit, chat, and dance and surround rich punters with beauty.

2.3 Using cash to establish status is not new. You use your wealth to put people in your debt and
thus make them obliged to you. You can see the same thing at lower levels. When I was doing my
research on loyalist terrorists in Northern Ireland, I spent a lot of time in UDA and UVF clubs. Unlike
the clubs Mears studies, these were concrete coal bunkers with no windows (the IRA would just
blow them in), harsh strip lighting, metal internal security gates, floors sticky with spilled beer, and a
thick fug of cigarette smoke. And you had what Mears’s party promoters call ‘whales’ in this world
too. Ultimately ‘Bunter’ derived his power over West Belfast from his ability to command people to
kill people but almost every evening he would spend a couple of hours ‘working’ the clubs in his
area. He would arrive with his bodyguards and work his way round the room, having a quiet word
with almost everyone. He asked after relatives and responded to requests for favours such as ‘a job
for wee Jimmy whose just finished his time [in prison]’. Sometimes he would slip someone £50.
Other times he would buy them a drink. If there was a celebration (for a good terror attack or a local
hero coming out of prison) he would put £300 behind the bar and announce freed rinks until the
money ran out. In those ways he both demonstrated his status and made all the recipients of his
largess obliged to him.

In the party scene, the conversion of wealth into status is much narrower: inviting people to join a
social activity normally beyond their means, lavishing drink on others, an expression of charity, one
of the purest ways to convert wealth into status: if someone cannot recompense the gift, the giver
reaps a return in prestige from everyone in the room who has just been made a dependant.

One big difference, however is that, unlike the Mafia or the UDA the obligation does not much
endure beyond the club and the evening. Another is that because we live in an age of digital social
model, the live activity has little value until it is pictured on social media.

2.3 The Scarcity Value of Beauty

One of the things I found most interesting about Mears’ work concerns the use of beauty. I had
always imagined that the point of wealthy men surrounding themselves with drop-dead gorgeous
and scantily clad women was sexual arousal and sexual activity. But if Mears is right the role of
beauty in the party circuit is quite different. In this world women are divided into models (that is real
models, not ‘Instagram models’, whom the promoters despise) and civilians. The models are not
only beautiful but they are unusually tall (even without the obligatory heels) and thin. The main role
of the party promoter is to provide squads of models so that the wealthy punters can drink and
dance in the company of beautiful women.

Mears starts with the paradox that no-one likes the models. The image promoters themselves do not
find them sexually attractive; most preferred a ‘good civilian’. Nor do they find them interesting;
most despise them as airheads. Even those who would hook up with one for a night anticipate
feeling bad about it in the morning. And although some punters sometimes had sex with the models
this was not common. The women who served the drinks – the bottle girls – were mostly good
civilians and they often did have sex with punters but the models were eye candy.

What makes the models in demand is not their attractiveness but their scarcity. Like currencies they
have no intrinsic value; what matters is their relative scarcity. If most women looked like models,
then short fat people would be in demand.

The party girls are not quite as devoid of intrinsic value: those most valued by the party promoters
can dance, can deport themselves properly in expensive restaurants and hotels, and can socialise
competently with strangers. But those characteristics are shared by many civilians. What makes the
girls an asset is that their beauty is associated with sexuality but is very scarce. Hence being in their
company is a rare experience. Hence being surrounded by them (even when they have in effect been
paid to be there) proves you are special: you are a VIP.

2.4 The Potlatch.

As Mears explains, the potlatch is a ceremony common in Polynesia (but with its equivalents
elsewhere) in which scare resources are deliberately and conspicuously wasted to prove your status
by establishing that you can afford to waste those resources. By spending thousands of dollars on
over-priced champagne that is sprayed in the air, whales prove their wealth and status.

2.5 Blurring the Commerce

An important theme of the book (and we return to it – much further down the social scale -- when
we look at Gordon Marshall’s Falkirk pub study) is the way that the line between commercial and
social activity is blurred. The club owners do what they do for profit. The party promoters get paid
(usually a percentage of the money spend by punters). For two rather different reasons, the party
promoters very rarely pay their girls.

Some provide subsidised or free accommodation (a considerable asset in New York); all provide free
meals, free club entry, and free drink. Some promoters spend all day doing favours for their girls
(such as driving them to modelling jobs or casting sessions). And when they try to round them up for
a particular event, they send out invitation texts that are indistinguishable from those friends would
send each other. The brutally commercial aspect is disguised. Why? I leave you to find the two
reasons Mears gives.

One could say that the girls are ‘exploited’, in that the promoters and club owners convert their
beauty (or ‘bodily capital’) into income for the club and the promoters. The girls are expected to
ensure those profits by pretending to drink champagne when actually they pour into flower pots or
leave their full glasses for the waiters to clear away so that the punter buys even more. So both
indirectly and directly the girls create value for the promoters and club owners but they do not get
paid. As Mears puts it: ‘Beauty may look like a route to get ahead for women but, in fact, beauty is
worth more in men’s hands than in women’s own’ (141).

Clearly this is unlike the exploitation of Bangladeshi children who are sewing expensive frocks for
30p a day in that the models are required only to do (in circumstances that are not always of their
choosing), the things they would have done anyway: dress up, wear make-up, go to expensive
restaurants, holiday in St Tropez, and dance the night away.

Mears documents an important paradox. Clubs exist to make a profit. Punters pay a lot for the
service. Only if they commit to spending a fortune on drinks for everyone do they get into the high
status section of the club. But everyone involved wants to disguise the commercial relationship. One
way that punters justify their conspicuous consumption is by asserting that their splurging is ok
because their wealth comes from hard work: we work hard so we can play hard. So the activity has
to appear as ‘play’, as recreation and as spontaneous. The background organization has to be hid so
that what is actually complex commerce feels to be consumers like (and can be presented on social
media as) a casual party.

2.6 Auto-Exploitation

It is easy to imagine a scathing feminist critique of the VIP party world but that would be judgement
rather than explanation. Mears uses notions like exploitation but she is not in the business of
condemning the VIPs or the girls or the promoters. She wants to understand how it works and
crucial to that is the recognition (a) that the girls themselves subscribe to the same value structure
as those who employ them (including scorn for civilians) (b) that the girls collude in their exploitation
because they enjoy being party girls.

3 METHODS

I could say much more about the findings but you can discover that for yourself by reading the book.
My main concern in this course is to introduce you to sociological research as an activity. So what did
Mears do?

3.1 She drew on her own experience of the thing she studied. She had been a model and a party
girl.

3.2 Her existing contacts provided her with entry into her research milieu.

3.3 She observed her world. She accompanied a number of party promoters as a ‘girl’. She
attended parties. She went to Miami with a promoter.

3.4 She formally interviewed a large number of promoters and fewer club owners and punters.
3.5 More usefully, she had innumerable casual conversations with people she met during her
research.

3.6 She uses language to give a sense of what her world feels like. One of the common
characteristics of the modern ethnography is the use of the local slang to give the feel that the
author (and thus the reader) are really there. Erving Goffman was the master of this style; almost
everything he writes uses the jargon of the people he writes about. So Mears introduces us to
whales, mooks, bridge and tunnel people, muppets, Instagram models, good civilians and the like.

The use of the local slang also serves to establish the author’s expertise. It proves that she knows
this world and that insider knowledge is the reason we should trust her report.

3.7 The reader’s confidence is also secured by the unexpected. Mears proves her insider
knowledge by telling us things we might not have guessed. For example, although she is mainly
concerned with the use of the girls’ bodily capital, she also notes the same principle applies to men.
Ugly men have to pay to get in. A beautiful man, especially if accompanied by models, gets in free.

4 ETHICS

Mears’ work sits on an ethical frontier. Arguably the ethical requirements we impose on our
students are much more constraining than those that are applied to professional researchers. I will
say much more about this next week when we read Laud Humphreys’ Tearoom Trade but most of us
work with a distinction between the public and private. There is nothing wrong with observing public
activities nor with doing the things you would normally have done even if you were not a researcher.
But you would need a powerfully good reason to spy on private activity (for example, I would defend
my work on terrorists by its importance).

Is Mears invading privacy or watching public events? Mears had attended bottle parties as a model
before she became a sociologist and going to clubs is something she would have done anyway.
Mears was up front with the people that she formally interviewed about her research and with the
promoters whom she shadowed but her research was partly covert in two senses:

(a) She kept her explanations vague – she was writing a book about night life – and did not explain
that she would be analysing people’s behaviour in ways (‘exploitation’, ‘bodily capital’, ‘emotional
labour’) that most would find a little demeaning and offensive.

(b) She did not ask all the people in a crowded club for their explicit permission for her to observe
and later write about their activities. But then how could she? Ask the DJ to stop playing banging
anthems long enough for her to explain to everyone what she was doing? Hand out informed
consent forms? That would have killed dead the very thing she was studying and would have been
much more intrusive than her covert observation.

She could defend herself by noting that the primary goal for the punters was to be observed in the
company of gorgeous girls ; the whole point of the sparklers was to show everyone in the club which
punter had just spent big thousands on champagne for strangers. Everybody constantly took
pictures to post on social media. This is exhibitionism. So it is a little hard to claim that the observed
were harmed by not being given a chance to avoid scrutiny.

5 TRUST AND PLAUSIBILITY

But the big meta-methodological issue for ethnography is the need for trust in the researcher. If I
doubt the conclusions of a statistical analysis of British Social Attitudes data, I can access the original
questionnaires, I can access the data, and I can re-analyse it. For example, the first UK census that
asked about religion (the 2001 one) produced the apparently counter-intuitive that more people in
England and Wales claimed a religious identity than did Scots, even though, according to church
records, more Scots were regularly churchgoers than were the English or Welsh. We are able to
explore that paradox and eventually explain it by going back to the original questionnaires and
discovering that the two census used differently worded questions about religious identity and
placed the questions in a different order.

The problem with ethnography is that it cannot be replicated. I have no choice but to believe that
Mears heard, and saw, and was told what she reports. It can use her own evidence to argue that she
has misinterpreted something. For example, I could argue that her use of the term ‘exploitation’ is
inappropriate for a group of people who are desperate to be exploited. We call the eighteenth
century use of women and young children to drag coal out of unsafe coal mines exploitation because
we know from the historical record that they did not want that work. But the models who support
party promoters are desperate to work as models. And they do not hesitate to tell Mears that they
like most aspects of the life.

So we can use internal evidence to challenge the ethnographer’s interpretation but we still have to
take it on faith that the people she interviewed did actually say the things she says they said. She
could have made it up (and such cases have been exposed; see any good biography of Carlos
Castaneda!). And the need to anonymity deepens that reliance. If she had used the real names of
her promoters, someone else could have interviewed them and we could compare the accounts.
Anonymising research may be ethical proper but it makes third party checking impossible.

The fact that her ‘data’ are personal observations and conversations that cannot readily be
converted into numbers means that she can only present a tiny proportion of her notes. She can give
us enough detail to illustrate a point but she cannot provide enough to persuade the sceptic.
QUESTIONS

Very Short Answers:

1 Who first coined the phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’? Thorsten Veblen.

2 Which two promoters had taken sociology class:? Thibault and Felipe (55)

3 How many promoters did she interview? 44

4 What distinguishes a model, a good civilian and a muppet?

5 What was the dismissive phrase used to describe clubgoers who could not afford to live in
Manhattan? Bridge and tunnel.

Longer Answers (max 150 words each):

6 If you were on the Ethics committee of Mears’ university, would you approve her research?
Do you approve

7 Why do promoters not pay their models?

8 What proof do we have that she did not make most of her interviews?

9 Why are there so few female party promoters?