My sister was a model in Los Angeles, and when she got a bit too old for that, she did this for a while.
Here's how she operated. She knew and networked with many other models in the area. A club promoter would tell her he needs X number of women at this club on this night.
My sister would then wrangle the requested number of women to go out. She would absolutely lie and not tell them that she was being paid $1,000+ to bring them out.
She would make up lots of lies to tell them. Oh, this event is happening, or this celebrity will be there, or these people you should meet. Whatever she could do to get them there.
These women would then be given free alcohol or any drink they wanted all night. Drugs if they wished as well.
Pretty messed up, in my opinion, and I think it brought her down a dark path. But it was interesting to hear about the business side of this first hand.
One time I was down in LA and she took me to a very high end club and I got to see all of this up close. No way I would of gotten in without being with her.
Not even just models. Attractive women all over the world can go out with a $10 bill in their pocket and drink all night and still have enough left for Taco Bell at the end. Free drinks are cheap.
It's interesting that she had to lie. That $1000 split between 5 girls would provide a living wage. And $200 for something you would be prepared to do for free seems pretty nice on the surface.
But that $200 is the difference between a "party girl" and a "whore". Perhaps not quite literally, but close enough that it's a really bad idea. The tactics used in the article to get girls to stay if they want to leave early are bad enough; once payment is involved...
And from the other side, rich people want to go to clubs full of party girls and will avoid clubs full of "whores".
I recently watched an episode of Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories on Netflix, season 2 episode 4. It was featuring an ex-model in Tokyo who was invited to a VIP event where "rich CEOs" would attend. Very similar to what you described, in some ways. The episode also explores a bit about the personal aspect of that sort of life, but very lightly. It seems to be a thing in Tokyo, too.
I used to go to clubs like this in Vegas and get bottle service all the time. A few notes.
1. The girls know why they are there. They may not know the economics of it exactly, but they got free admission to a club with a giant line and cover fee. They got told all night “those gentlemen over there want to buy your drinks” and then escorted behind the ropes. They’re not stupid. They knew this wasn’t because of their personalities, though many of them were lovely people too. I ended ul dating a med school student who went on to become a brain surgeon that I met that way.
2. Any sex was consensual. I never saw any prostitution or the like. Most of the girls just enjoyed the free drinks for a few hours left. The only girls I saw who were probably prostitutes were brought there by certain celebrities.
3. It’s not your bar tab that keeps the service flowing, it’s the gratuities. We didn’t buy bottles of Louis, and probably spent less on the alcohol than most of the people behind the ropes. But we probably tipped everyone (and I mean everyone) more than the guys who did. Every time the bouncers see a couple extremely attractive women they’ll send them to your table. Every time they’ve got a great party coming up the bartenders will send you a text. We had a house out there and invited them to our bbqs on their off nights, and that goes a long way.
4. Is all of this immoral? I don’t really see how. Everyone knew what they were doing.
Way back in the early 2000s, I was involved in edm event promotion, and bottle service is a thing even for people who aren’t millionaires. It was pretty normal for like a group of 5 guys to drop $1000+ plus on a table reservation every once in a while and you do it for a few practical reasons that have nothing to do with glamour:
1) skip the line
2) Cover is included
3) regular drinks at the bar are expensive as shit anyway.
4) You have a place to sit down in a crowded club.
5) you have a server that comes to you instead of having to find a place at the bar.
A regular night at the club could easily be $150 a person if you count cover, drinks and buying drugs. What’s another $100 a person for a much better experience at that point. Keeping in mind that if you don’t have a table, you’re stuck down on a crowded dance floor for hours and hours and when you aren’t fighting at a bartender to notice you.
Well, “nothing to do with glamour” except insofar as the entire club scene is built on signaling glamour (status, more specifically).
The whole ecosystem persists all the way down to average folks going for a night on the town and hoping to chat up a few women (who are not paid/promoted models, but have ultimately similar motives). The superficiality permeates downwards too.
In my experience, the “hotter” the club, the less people dance or mingle, the more they signal.
Edit: I’ll draw a somewhat bright line between clubs who offer bottle service/VIP (in my view inevitably ending up like the above^, even if it makes practical sense) and those clubs which do not. It seems to me the bulk of the money moving would be occurring in the former.
Yeah, that's my impression too - although it's inaccurate to say that the entire club scene is like that, there's plenty of great clubs that are about fun instead of status.
I was in Miami (Beach) for a few weeks, and despite its status as a party town I like partying much more most other places. Frankly Miami as a whole was kinda sickening for its massive income disparities and how everyone seemed to aspire to become "VIP"s, both at night and in life in general.
Great clubs are egalitarian, where everybody is just having fun and spreading the joy to the people around them. Unfortunately they can be hard to find without local connections, as Google often only surfaces the high status clubs.
Not really — some edm shows focus on the music as much or as more than the glamour — Glow in DC is one in particular that has straddled that particularly well. They have always had a lot of kids going who don’t dress up and go to dance only. And of course the underground edm shows that don’t have bottle service at all and are purely about the music.
When I was talking about ‘normal’ people getting bottle service, I meant people who were there because they liked the DJ and not for all the other stuff.
In my experience, most of the good parties are run by people who love dance music and know how to build a community around it. Most of them have nothing but contempt for high rollers who go to flash money around, even if they cater to them to stay in business.
Yeah totally agreed. I personally have not encountered a club that has bottle service/VIP that doesn’t degrade into the sort of thing described in the article.
There are, of course, plenty of clubs that are entirely oriented around dancing which are great. They tend to be on the less “hot” end of the spectrum (because the term basically means status-building).
> the entire club scene is built on signaling glamour (status, more specifically)
Not really sure where you're coming from? The club scene is pretty egalitarian, both in politics and practically - everyone's the same on the dance floor. The only exception is the VIP areas, and I don't think they're an essential part of the club scene.
There are certainly clubs that don’t fit that description, but the industry, the real bulk of the cash flow and the natural end state of most successful clubs, is a status economy.
A club that can be successful and not devolve into this is an outlier that certainly takes extreme care to stay that way.
I think this is highly dependent on the club, and the scene. There are absolutely clubs that cater to people with status. It's usually obvious at first glance whether you're at a place that focuses on the music, or focuses on the high spenders in the VIP area.
Hell, in Vegas the dance floors of some clubs seem almost like an afterthought.
Even if you manage to signal somehow (real or not doesn't matter) your finances, people start liking your money instead of you.
The most valuable social status, the type that actually matters, is the one you get from not caring about what people think of you, having massive fun and brightening the day of the people you interact with.
>Even if you manage to signal somehow (real or not doesn't matter) your finances, people start liking your money instead of you.
That's an argument about why financial status signalling is ineffective for true friendship and true happiness.
Not about whether financial status signalling happens or not.
Besides, many people don't care for "true friendship and true happiness" (or get that from other sources). They do their financial status signalling still, to advance themselves, have others kiss their ass, get women, and feel good by flaunting their money...
Perhaps more of interest to the HN crowd is the end of the article where it talks about the motivations of these promoters. They want to get out of the small money business of convincing pretty girls to show up at clubs and into the big money business of connecting rich people to investments.
It is one of the paths towards angel investment. It's not that hard to find people who claim they know rich people and who can "hook you up". It might be slightly more fruitful a path than responding to the Nigerian prince email in your spam folder, but only slightly...
"Dre was convinced that his connections with the elite would eventually earn him a big business deal... But these never came to anything. Clients were happy to call him when they wanted to go out, but that didn’t mean they took him seriously as a business partner."
I'm not convinced this was Dre's primary motive. In a good year, he earned $200,000 -- certainly enough for comfortable life. He also partook in the presence of the powerful and wealthy mixed in with models. He was getting paid and still got the entertainment aspect of attending the party, and that's why he was there.
When I was in my early 20s I used to hate nught clubs because they are loud useless places,where you can't even hear your own thoughts because of sound levels. Now I've grown up a bit, I can't imagine going to one even if someone would pay me. If I was in a position to spend 10K a night in a club,my understanding of having a good night would definitely not have a night club in it.
Night club experiences vary significantly depending on what club you go to and what people you go with.
Your typical night club in the heart of the city filled with drunk people (overflowing from bars) is not the same as the more "upscale" nightclubs on the edges of the city.
The former case is a miserable experience and I agree with you, but the latter can be enjoyable.
Disclaimer: like programming, I forced myself to like going out. A lot of hobbies I have are things I didn't initially like. I like to understand how malleable I am. Apparently, I'm pretty malleable, haha. In both cases, it took years to like it.
In both cases there were moments where I even felt a raging passion for it. For programming it was making a computer graphics engine and for going it's whenever me and the DJ aligned musically which put me into a trance and helped me to dance so much that I was basically working out.
Fun fact: immersive multimedia is the underlying "passion factor" of going out and programming. Both activities sometimes give trance-like states or feelings of wonder and other magical feelings.
> Night club experiences vary significantly depending on what club you go to and what people you go with.
This. I used to experiment by going out alone, sometimes (15 times in total).
Things get a lot more fun when 30 British tourists take you under their wing, because they like your openness and disarming demeanour. It doesn't even take much social skills to be honest. I was sober the whole time.
Or when you meet a group of 20 Spanish people (learning Spanish while slightly intoxicated, haha) and learn some Spanish Dance moves while meeting a future Dutch girlfriend.
I love Amsterdam :)
Or (I'll stop after this one) learn to fire dance in Thailand (without fire) and actually learn a basic trick! Everyone, including myself, was surprised I was capable of any form of movement let alone coordinated successful one. We were all super wasted.
But I also had nights out alone where I'd wallflower, that wasn't a lot of fun. I never knew up front if I'd wallflower or get some epic adventure as my social skills and pro-activity have a high variance. In most cases, I had epic adventures though.
And the same is true for when you go out with a group of people that you know. I did that a whole lot more. Going out with friends can actually be quite tricky in order to get a fun party result. I found that going out alone was easier.
This article is more interesting for what it doesn’t talk about than it does. There’s only the vaguest allusion to organized crime and sex trafficking, which seems odd if you’re talking about a “secret economics” involving models and night clubs.
> " Over the last few decades, a new elite has emerged, partly as a result of deregulation of the financial sector in the West and partly because of the spread of global capitalism across the world. This elite is more geographically dispersed and mobile than the aristocrats and capitalists of yesteryear."
Remember that decadence is not intrinsic to the human condition; rather, the fruit of capitalism.
> But what is banned on HN is complaining about paywalls, so please don't do that.
Where does it say that? I can understand being OK with paywalls but unless the site actually explicitly says complaining about paywalls is banned, you are lying.
Here's how she operated. She knew and networked with many other models in the area. A club promoter would tell her he needs X number of women at this club on this night.
My sister would then wrangle the requested number of women to go out. She would absolutely lie and not tell them that she was being paid $1,000+ to bring them out.
She would make up lots of lies to tell them. Oh, this event is happening, or this celebrity will be there, or these people you should meet. Whatever she could do to get them there.
These women would then be given free alcohol or any drink they wanted all night. Drugs if they wished as well.
Pretty messed up, in my opinion, and I think it brought her down a dark path. But it was interesting to hear about the business side of this first hand.
One time I was down in LA and she took me to a very high end club and I got to see all of this up close. No way I would of gotten in without being with her.
Different world.