Very Important People Quotes

“The wealthy spenders at every VIP club, everywhere in the world, are almost always heterosexual men.”
― Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

“promoter’s job is to stage a show of two types of power—wealth and beauty—embodied in the form of rich men and girls, respectively.”
― Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

“Simply by being there and looking beautiful, they generate enormous value for the club industry, the individual men operating within it, and the larger urban economy of New York City. Their value emerges from the very specific conditions in which they are seen. Most importantly, these “girls” exist in an altogether different social category from women. And because I want readers to experience this difference, I strategically use the term “girl” from here on without quotation marks to refer to this category of women in the VIP arena. Because in this rarefied world there is an unspoken but widely understood logic: girls are valuable; women are not.”
― Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

“I coded interview transcripts and field notes in several waves using the software Nvivo to organize the themes of these chapters, which emerged inductively over multiple rounds of reading, rereading, and listening to my recordings. As a condition of access, I have replaced all names of persons and places with pseudonyms, except when requested otherwise, and I have removed potentially identifying information.”
― Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

“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 shape our dreams and desires, and they merit careful attention.”
― Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

“Depending on the context, conspicuous consumption generates not status but disdain; one need only consider journalistic critiques of elite lifestyles, as well as the way clients themselves talked with disdain about their own expenditures.”
― Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

“That one could acquire status simply by buying luxury things was a radical idea.5 Aristocrats responded to the threat with legal restrictions on what lower classes could wear or consume. Under sumptuary laws in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an aristocrat could own crystal, but a merchant could not, or if the latter did, he had to pay an extra tax. Sumptuary laws especially targeted women’s dress and presentation. The heel of a woman’s shoe, her necklace, and the lace on her sleeves each marked her social position and the position of the men in her family. Wives and daughters of knights were allowed long trains of precious gold and silk on their dresses; wives of merchants were subject to fines if they dared such display.”
― Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

“exploitation works best when it is enjoyable”
― Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

“The uncertainty over exactly how or when repayment happens can make a gift more burdensome than a clearly delineated market transaction.”
― Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

“Within this flattened global field of wealth, elites are no longer anchored to the normative holds of local communities.”
― Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit