But what of the motivation of the bottle clients? The most notorious of these, until he became an international fugitive and vanished into the maw of the People’s Republic of China, was Jho Low, the Malaysian-Chinese businessman who is accused of a $4.5 billion fraud. The rule will be bent, however, if a rapper arrives with a retinue of models in tow. Mears is fascinating about ‘face control’, whereby doormen refuse entry to (female) ‘fatties’ or ‘elves’, while welcoming whales with a passing resemblance to Shrek and ‘velvet rope racism’, whereby, in order to maintain the general whiteness of the clientele, there is a rule of one brown person in for every one who leaves. Interestingly, the bulk of the clubs’ profits comes not from the whales, but from the aspirational lesser players, the parties of investment bankers and real estate salesmen: ‘Unlike celebrities and higher-status VIPs, these men always pay.’ Bottle trains (buying a large number of bottles at once) are often recognised with special lighting effects and the DJ playing a particular track. Gifting bottles to other tables is commonplace and is often reciprocated.
Sometimes these pissing contests are trailed in advance other times they degenerate into open warfare, as with the confetti-like shards of glass which resulted from a bottle fight between Chris Brown and Drake at a New York club in 2012. The same club owner would shine a flashlight on the forehead of a whale when he paid the bill at the end of the night.
You get them in so they can do this’ – he flexed his biceps. Mears quotes one Hong Kong club owner as saying: ‘Those guys, they want to show off. In an ideal VIP club scenario, a couple of whales will face off and egg each other on to buy more and more expensive bottles of champagne. The burden of expenses was obviated by the ‘comping’ culture of the clubs, since she could pass as a slightly older ‘girl’. Over an 18-month period she went out with promoters on 100 different nights in 17 different clubs in New York. Through all those nights in New York and Miami, the Hamptons, Cannes and Saint-Tropez, Mears would often dash to the ladies’, not to ingest another line of coke but to hurriedly type notes of conversations on her phone. It must have been tricky justifying her project to fellow academics as something more than a licence for hedonism – but just as being a bottle girl means paying for hospitality with ‘embodied and emotional labours’, so it is that researching this book must have been emotionally draining. Mears sets herself the not uncomplicated task of combining a gossipy exposé of the VIP nightclub world and the complex service economy which underpins it, with an earnest sociological analysis of its structures, tropes, and rituals.
‘Like any organized social form, the potlatch is a collective ritual that unfolds in carefully scripted situations it is constituted by a shared culture of excess and the collective valorisation of waste.’ ‘It takes an enormous amount of labour to pull o a successful potlatch,’ writes Ashley Mears, a former model who is now a professor of sociology at Boston University. The modern equivalent of the potlatch takes place in VIP nightclubs and involves high-spending ‘whales’, or ‘bottle clients’, competing to buy ever more expensive bottles of champagne for sharing with male friends and sexually desirable ‘girls’, usually models, who are provided by specialist promoters, who in turn are paid fees by the nightclub owners. From 1885 to 1951, potlatches were banned by the Canadian authorities because they were seen as contrary to the Christian capitalist values of capital accumulation in God’s service. Sometimes it would involve deliberately destroying items of great worth. The Potlach was a ritual feast at which Native Americans of the Northwest Pacific gave out items of value to celebrate their own status, and to confer status on other tribal members. Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit By Ashley Mears, (Princeton University Press, £25) A fashion model turned sociology professor reveals the inner workings of the VIP nightclub scene Very Important People
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