(Not) Very Important People: Millennial Fantasies of Mobility in the Age of Excess

Abstract

In her fascinating but frustrating new book, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit, American sociologist, Ashley Mears (2020) offers both academic and mainstream readers a titillating, cross-over tour around the "cool" nightclub and party scene of the "global elite." It is perhaps not so much global, however, as American, in the sense of the heteropatriarchal, middle-aged, male, working rich of America (or more precisely of its financial capital New York), jetting into their traditional party hotspots of Miami, Saint-Tropez, or the French Riviera, to party with young women who are (indirectly) paid (in-kind) to pose with them. Whether intentional or unintentional, along the way Mears also offers a dark mirror to the fears and fantasies of a rather lost millennial generation, raised in a new media, image age, which has coupled fast and furious performative excess to old fashioned sexual objectification, in the guise of fun and empowerment for the beautiful people.