“An industry run by men and for men, but which relies on girls”

Ashley Mears, professor of sociology at Boston University, publishes in France Very Important People. Money, fame and beauty: investigation into the heart of the jet-set (The Discovery, 400 pages, 25 euros). A former model, the sociologist was able to penetrate the closed circle of night establishments reserved for a wealthy and globalized clientele. With models and “promoters”, responsible for recruiting young girls for luxury clubs, she deciphers a staggering system, with an archaic appearance.

Your book is about the nightlife reserved for the international jet set. When did these VIP clubs emerge?

In the late 1990s, cities like New York transformed to meet the needs of a new class of wealthy nomads. The emergence of VIP clubs coincides with an era of expansion and globalization of extreme wealth. They began to orchestrate the visibility of the richest clients, to encourage competition. During the 2000s, in clubs, the price of bottles skyrocketed, we saw the appearance of gold-plated bottles, encrusted with diamonds, as well as the “bottle service”, this way of serving bottles of champagne with luminous sprays. Clubs began to encourage competition between high rollers and the public display of spending. Global metropolises are going through a real crisis of abundance. We live in an era of wealth concentration as extreme as that of the 1920s.

You also compare these festivals to those of Gatsby, studied by the economist Thorstein Veblen, or even with the potlatch, this Native American ceremony organized around the gift…

When I wanted to give meaning to this form of consumption, I first appealed to obvious predecessors, such as the American economist Thorstein Veblen, who wrote at the turn of the 19th^e and the 20th^e century. He observed with a sort of disgust the nouveau riche of American industry who spent lavishly on extravagant parties. Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption”. The anthropologist Franz Boas, for his part, studied the potlatch among the tribes of the Pacific Northwest. These are great ceremonial feasts organized to waste, accompanied by real competitions of donations and counter-gifts. The anthropologist Marcel Mauss also wrote on this subject: the logic of squandering, which consists of showing that one can give more than someone else, makes it possible to determine one’s place in the social hierarchy. It’s a way of signaling that you are the most important person in the group, because you can waste the most and give the greatest gift…

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