Elite show models8/7/2023 ![]() This service is worth something to models, but it’s worth more to the promoter because it means he gets paid a good wage. Promoters offer a valuable service by bringing them into the clubs. ![]() Nobody has money their kitchens are not fully stocked. Places like Milan and New York have a lot of transient young women who are coming through and staying in less-than-ideal housing situations with other people who are their same age and are newcomers in the industry. This is all part of a side economy or parallel economy in elite nightlife that was supported by and supported fashion modeling. I thought, “What a nice guy! My luck, this Maximo!” It took me a couple of weeks to realize that he didn’t just work for the agency he worked for the club through the agency and getting the girls was part of his job. Then, he lets me know that there’s a dinner that evening, and I’m invited. He’s a nice young guy he gets me a cappuccino, takes my baggage, and helps me get to the apartment. ![]() When I got off the plane, jet-lagged, there was Maximo. When I was nineteen, I traveled to Milan alone the agency arranged my flight and my apartment and had a driver meet me at the airport. During the summers before I graduated college, I would travel abroad for short-term modeling contracts. I had known this connection existed before this. When I graduated from university, I went to model in Hong Kong and was very aware how close the ties between modeling and nightlife were the person that owned the modeling agency I was working at also owned the nightclub downstairs where everybody partied. What was this transition into elite nightlife like?Īshley Mears: I was a first-generation college student on scholarship at the University of Georgia. Specifically, the ethnographic study she conducted when writing Very Important People shines a light on the pervasive gender inequality and systems of exploitation built into the global party circuit.Īlyssa Merritt: Before conducting your ethnographic study for your book Very Important People, you experienced the world of elite nightlife firsthand as a young fashion model. She studies the connections between economic, gender, and cultural sociology with a focus on the value society places on people and on things. She is also the author of Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model (2011) and Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit (2020). Directed by Professors Margaret Weir and Jim Morone, the initiative brings together the Brown community-as students, teachers, and scholars-for an urgent conversation about the consequences of great wealth and inequality on American politics, society, and culture.Īshley Mears is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston University and a former fashion model. Editors’ Note: This is the third installment of an interview series conducted in collaboration with the Stone Inequality Initiative at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
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