Ashley Mears

Fascinating book. Mears spent several years with party promoters—almost all men, often Black men—who made money by bringing models or attractive “civilians” to high-end clubs so that the clubs would be attractive to big-spending men (usually white US, European, Arab, or Asian men). Acceptable “girls” have to look under thirty, be five foot seven or over and wear heels, and thin—and they are mostly white though a real model is always welcome whatever her race; being “hot” isn’t enough because the clubs want a specific “model” look. The big spenders, the promoters say, want “the real thing” if they’re spending $15,000 a night. The girls are there to dance, mingle, or just be there and look beautiful. “[G]irls are valuable; women are not.”

Mears emphasizes all the work that is required to create these experiences of pleasure and lack of inhibition, where—most visibly—hundreds of bottles of champagne can be wasted in displays of excess that no one seems willing to fully endorse while they’re not experiencing it. Almost every client Mears interviewed criticized staged displays of waste, but defended their own large bills. Because of the biggest “whales,” “even the biggest spenders could see their purchases as relatively modest.” Some also attributed the worst excesses to ethnic others: Russians and Saudis. Or they attributed them to people who didn’t work to earn their money, the way they themselves did. One line: “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.” It was common for male clients to say that they deserved occasional indulgences because they worked so hard, and also that it was an important way to network with potential business partners.

The distinctions get even more complicated, because the richest men are often comped drinks because of the expectation that they’ll bring even more business, like holding a party at the club or investing in the owner’s next venture. So most clubs make the bulk of their profits from $1500 to $3000 tables populated by “affluent tourists and businessmen” who “regularly run up high-volume tabs because they, too, want to be close to power and beauty,” but who aren’t comped. (They might avoid having to pay a high table minimum if they come in with three or four models, though.)

Conspicuous consumption doesn’t just happen; people around rich people have to work very hard “to mobilize people into what looks like the spontaneous waste of money.” She focuses on “the backstage work of vulnerable women and marginalized men,” in which girls are “a form of capital. Their beauty generates enormous symbolic and economic resources for the men in their presence, but that capital is worth far more to men than to the girls who embody it.” Clubs let clients “act out domination over each other and over girls’ bodies, without the taboo that comes with hiring women directly …. In paying for wildly inflated prices on alcohol, clients buy the invisibility of the labor it took to bring girls to them; they pay to not have to bring girls themselves, or to pay a broker outright to procure girls. They are buying, in part, the illusion of spontaneity.”

And of course the clients and business owners don’t think of the girls as people who might have interesting minds or careers; there is a constant risk of stigmatization as a sex worker, which also usefully functions to limit what girls might ask for. While men used girls to make friends and deals, girls “who demanded a share of profits, in the form of financial support or gifts, were deemed users, schemers, and whores.” This is what Mears means when she says that female beauty was worth more to the men who traded in it than to the women who theoretically had it. Relatedly, the labor required for the girls to be present in the clubs is invisible, assumed to be leisure. Club owners pay promoters thousands of dollars to bring a group of high-quality models in, but owners or promoters would never pay the women themselves to attend, because that wouldn’t be authentic (and many girls would have found that unpleasant, feeling too much like work). Most girls didn’t know how much promoters made, and generally estimated that promoters earned a lot less than they actually did.

Mears also emphasizes that these are complicated mixtures of pleasure, work, and exploitation for both the “girls” and the promoters, who act as friends and often errand runners, housing providers and/or sexual partners for the girls. (Girls rarely have sex with actual clients; the main point is to show off an excess of female beauty, just like the empty champagne bottles that were sprayed around show off the ability to waste alcohol.) The girls get to go exclusive places they couldn’t afford on their own, including foreign locales, but they have to go out and hang out in the clubs in return. The relational work the promoters did highlights that “exploitation works best when it feels good.” The promoters, who are rarely from higher class backgrounds, often think that they’ll be able to join the big spenders who will eventually back their own business ventures—and this has even happened to a few promoters turned club owners—but mostly they too are providing a service and are ultimately replaceable.… (mehr)

An insider's look at the modelling world and how it assigns value to looks. A little unsatisfying because the answer is ultimately "randomly", but that is the nature of the industry. High value editorial work pays very little yet generates buzz and further business. Commercial work pays the bills, but is low value work that is given little credibility and is looked down upon by those in the business. "Money girls" are much loved by agencies even as they are dismissed as ordinary and unappealing. And other than pornography, modelling is one of the few professions in which women habitually make more than men. The book is an interesting look at a side of the business that one does not normally see… (mehr)

Mears did her sociology dissertation as a participant-observer, or observing participant, in the modeling industry in London and New York. She discusses the divide between “commercial” modeling, where conventional beauty rules (and there’s more diversity in terms of race and body size), and “editorial” modeling, which has higher status but generally a lot worse pay unless you become a superstar. Participants disclaim any control over who becomes a star, or even who gets cast in an average show, and yet they also work together to construct a market in which success is attributed to a magic something that just happens to favor thinness and whiteness (and femaleness: men are paid much worse). Bookers and clients claim color-blindness, but then they just can’t find models of color who match their desires. Mears collected a lot of revealing quotes, including one who said that the ideal model of color would be white except for her skin. “[T]here just aren’t enough really good models of color, just as there are no ‘fierce’ size 12 girls, because with tacitly racist, sexist assumptions, they do not fit the bill.”

Gender assumptions mean that men get paid an order of magnitude less than women—but white models make the same amount as models of color, despite the lesser “demand,” because that pay disparity would seem racist instead of natural and justified. Male modeling occurs under gender threat because male models are doing something that women are supposed to do: exist to be looked at. As a result, bookers tend to view male models as less professional or serious, less able to learn modeling as a “craft” of bodily control and display. Thus bookers accept lower rates for men because they think men have less to offer. Since modeling is less of a culturally acceptable aspiration for men than for women, it seems to attract men who don’t need to be taken as seriously. Agencies therefore invest less in developing men’s careers. Clients think there must be something wrong with men willing to “debase their masculinity and career options for a shot at modeling, which is … a very long shot for a viable career for men.” They expect less from men, “because men’s looks are not something to be perfected and played with like women’s.” So it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it all looks natural. Male models manage these difficulties by devaluing their own contributions and claiming to be in the profession just to have money to travel, etc. They positioned women’s better pay as a kind of revenge or justice for pay inequities in men’s favor elsewhere. “[Women are] the ones who should be doing it,” as one male model said. Or, as Mears concludes, modeling is a safe place for women to “rule” because it proves that they aren’t a real threat to men’s structural dominance: they only win when the contest is whose bodies are more highly valued as objects of the gaze. Then the participants use the reified construct of “the market” to explain the value systems they’ve created.

Male models also got used to flirting with the large number of gay men on the production side of the fashion industry, even though they mostly identified as heterosexual. Male models reported a lot more sexual harassment to Mears than female models did (though it’s not clear to me that she pursued the question with women).… (mehr)