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today I am chatting with Ashley Mears who is professor of sociology at Boston University and this year she is publishing one of my very favorite books of the year it is called very important people status and beauty in the global
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party circuit publication date May 26th I'm also a big fan of her earlier book called pricing beauty the making of a fashion model Ashley welcome hi Kylie thank you thanks for having me let's just jump right in when wealthy men are
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in clubs why do they want other wealthy men to see them surrounded by beautiful women okay like you don't really need a sociologist to answer that question I mean beautiful women are a sign of status of high status and so wealthy men
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like to surround themselves in the same way that you would see a kind of curated entourage you know in lots of different historical forms but yeah so beautiful women in the VIP club land are a sign of status and it's a certain kind of beauty
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I mean that's the interesting thing about beauty right it's always in the eye of the beholder but in the VIP world which caters to these rich men the kind of beauty is the kind that's defined as very rare according to the fashion
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modeling industry so very tall very thin predominantly although not exclusively white and with the kind of look that you would see in a high-end fashion magazine but I know for instance a lot of CEOs from the Midwest and they are not
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seeking to see themselves surrounded by beautiful women they hang out with their wives whom they seem to love their wives are more or less the same age what accounts for that cross-sectional variation okay so very important people
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is not about all economic elites it's about this subsection of economic elites who are predominantly young their affluent tourists or businesspeople who are coming through places like New York or on this global Jet Set calendar in
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for instance Center pay or st. bard or the Hampton and so it's a certain type of young economically powerful predominately young economically powerful man that goes to these spaces and can purchase over the course of the night that
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feeling of being high status this feeling this kind of temporary feeling of being like the big man in anthropological terms it's not to say however that the Midwestern CEO doesn't occasionally take a trip to New York and
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you know dip into these faces they're welcome to I mean any any man with money can come into these places and if you think about some of the really like I don't know how to put this like rich people on really great behavior like I
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don't know the Bill Gates's of the world who are you know kind of seem very grounded and hardworking and you know family men they occasionally also go into these high-profile places and you know get crazy in the VIP section of a
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nightclub they're not the main fare for for these clubs but they're definitely welcome and they come and go but say I want to be known publicly as a man surrounded by many of these beautiful women so what sector am i likely to be
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in or what age am i likely to be or what's predicting that correlation right so and it would be people who have a lot of disposable money where their money is kind of coming in quickly money comes in quickly it goes out quickly so as people
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who get the bonus in Wall Street where a lot of the people that I met in these spaces if people are in their 30s in their 40s recent divorcees so recently single people who are kind of you know have are going through a wild moment in their life there would be occasional business people who are interested in doing business and that this is one of the forms in which they can bond with one another especially the case in some forms of finance and so
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they might be in these arenas as well I mean so it's a it's a bit of a mix it's some people are really into this VIP club experience for a couple of years but for men I mean it wouldn't be uncommon to see men that were in their
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50s and 60s uncommon to see women in their 50s or 60s by for the most part it would be younger men who have have you know a lot of money that they can spend are these male signalers mostly high time preference people who quote-unquote have
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a lot of money but actually are not that well-off and they want to send a short-run signal and they don't care very much about 20 years out is that the right way to think about it so there's definitely some of those people and you can find them through some of the lawsuits where they'll come into a club and they actually don't even have any money but they they come in and they pretend to be like a big spender called a whale and then they run up a
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high bill and then their credit card declines it the next day and in the end of going to court in the club so that happens sometimes or I mean the so to go to one of these clubs with the bottle service formula you you rent the table
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for the night and then the bottles of alcohol get brought to your table and then there you know there's just huge price inflation on the bottles so for a single person to do that you know it could be a tab of two thousand dollars
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three thousand of say five men or six men and they're willing to spend it can actually be it's not that much money if it's a group of men who go in and then they get this VIP treatment so it can be kind of economical in that sense now if you take the men who go to these clubs do you think they're much more narcissistic in terms of their basic personality features or do you think that most man's would have given the opportunity to fit
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into those slots readily and just slide into that world so yeah I think that most men really could slide into that world I mean it's for sure like there's across the spectrum there are some people for whom this really ticks the box that this satisfies a need to be seen and to feel high status and it's very validating and very important I don't think that that's necessarily a stable attribute of that person over their life course it might
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just fit the kind of banker culture that they're immersed in you know when they're thirty and working on Wall Street on the other hand I think that a lot of for instance academics who look at this and hold their nose and say these are
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like pathological status seeking people would probably also enjoy a night or two out in these arenas I mean part of its because a nightclub they're really good at orchestrating this experience so that it feels good and this was something
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that was really interesting so I also did interviews with the people that are buying bottles only 20 so and not a random sample but just to get a sense of like how do people talk about it and process and put into words what you know
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they're experiencing at these clubs and those people themselves who even spend a lot of money on bottles would talk about it it's like yeah it's tacky or it's ridiculous alright I I know that it looks bad so everybody everybody knows
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that you know status as a sensitive good you can't just like go out and buy it without losing status right and so everybody kind of knows that and yet the club is really good its setting it up so that it feels completely appropriate and it's
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celebrated and it feels good to be in these spaces it's really thrilling and exciting to be in them can the non deliberateness of status seeking be sustained in the longer ride let me explain that if you're to obviously
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throwing money around to look like a high status person you don't look high status so it's all made casual and indirect but over time people figure out those are the casual indirect signals for something that is actually somewhat
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grossly loved status so how does the equilibrium keep in place doesn't everyone figure out that the casual behavior is totally deliberate well yes but I guess it depends on like who's that everyone in that audience and so
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one thing that kind of comes up in research on status is that people don't really mind if like the Donald Trump's out there are you know living in a gold-plated penthouse what they care about are like the people that are around them in their milieu and so I mean if you're thinking about like a 30 year old Wall Street banker who's blowing off money and as part of this lifestyle and everybody else in that world that he's connected to you is also
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a part of it I mean it can you know they can run that it's fun for quite a while and it doesn't really matter if like let's say your friends the CEOs in the Midwest who are more demure and think that's tacky doesn't really matter what they think
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because they're in separate worlds anyway but if you take something like say Playboy Clubs which just to be clear I've never been to my senses they've become they became much lower status over time so the clubs you're writing
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about are they on a downward trajectory of losing status as the deliberateness becomes clearer yeah so this is what some of the promoters have said that that promoters recognize that this is not a in the long run it's not something
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that's going to be sustained that you know like any fashion trend in consumption there'll be something else it becomes a high marker of status like I don't know a peloton bike riding or something so yeah I mean in some ways it
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this is a kind of cyclical nature of consumption that there's always some other thing that can denote status by you know they did the elite will grab onto you and then it'll trickle down and become more popular I mean I think this moment elet on I have by the way well then you're in a different kind of Club Siler yeah you're in but just with the different a different kind of high state is showing if someone called me bridge-and-tunnel
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what would that be referring to okay ouch well so Manhattan being an island it's it's the term that denotes somebody who's seen is not having enough money or cultural competency to make it to live in Manhattan so they have to travel by
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Bridger Tunnel from Brooklyn or from Staten Island to come in and they try to get into the door and the door person quickly recognizes that this is an outsider and they don't belong so I am in fact from New Jersey what is it about
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me that they would see as the giveaway so what about you in particular I mean I a general person from New Jersey okay well New Jersey is of course a you know big and varied state and there's a lot of people in New Jersey that would
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be welcome to come into the club but the shorthand of Jersey as bridge-and-tunnel is like queue up somebody from the Jersey Shore basically somebody who might have money but doesn't have any kind of what we might call cultural
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capital you know they don't know how to dress they don't look sophisticated they're showing they're showing their money and it's you obvious way like wigs I don't know like a flashy chains or something and so they would be denied
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entrance let's say a Nobel Prize winner showed up at the club necessary with proof of the prize Milton Friedman right I'm looking would they let him in the Economist getting in yeah you know if they have to be rich economist and also
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willing to spend so yeah like a trickle-down economist maybe if they're willing to to spend a lot of money on these tables I mean they're kind of two things that the club values most are money and beauty and it's women's beauty
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and men's money that make up the kind of to two things that the club wants inside so if somebody if a man shows up and he has money he's in so I mean the Nobel Prize mmm it's a certain kind of celebrity yes celebrities are also
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welcome and celebrities sometimes don't pay because they add value to this base just by virtue of being there because everybody can say I partied with Kanye West you know our party it was Milton Friedman I don't know yeah maybe let's say I had a rule not to eat food in restaurants that were full of beautiful women thinking that the food will be worse is that a good rule or a bad rule so I know this rule because because I was reading that when you
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published that book it was when I was doing the field work like 2012 mm yes yeah I know I remember reading it and laughing because you're saying avoid trendy restaurants for the beautiful women and I was like yeah I'm one of
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those people that's actually ruining the food but creating value in these other forms because being a part of this this scene in producing status so yeah I think that's absolutely correct the the thing that you know maybe is interesting for you about about
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my book that helps explain your book is that the beautiful women that are inside these restaurants you know giving off status there's this whole organized system to bring them there that it either the restaurants and the club's
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hire on a contract basis this group of people called promoters party promoters and their job is to go out and find a bunch of beautiful women and then bring them to the restaurant and in the women get dinner for free so the food comes
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out family-style and they eat for free and then that sets up the obligation that then she'll go with him to the nightclub which is you know usually upstairs or attached in some way or there the managers are connected and so
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they're kind of both profiting on having beautiful women in there and selling the experience of being around beautiful women but indeed the food's not that great in this whole arrangement how happy are the club girls but relative to
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their peers who would otherwise be demographically similar well it's an interesting question I think that for the women that end up going out with promoters in the VIP they're motivated by a range of things so for many of them
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because they're recruited from the bottom of the fashion modeling industry and that was one thing that I found in my first book that most models don't make very much money so they actually need to eat they need to be there they
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don't have very much money and so the promoters are opening up for them a glamorous network of friends that also comes with these clear perks like expenses paid wining and dining and these experiences that models otherwise
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can't afford which is ironic because you know for you Tyler you're like looking for a good restaurant and you see this trendy place full of beautiful people the reality is you know most of them probably can't afford to eat in those
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places on their own or maybe they're actually motivated to go to those places to get the free meal so in that sense there's a trade-off that's clear and I and I think they think that the promoters and this VIP club land does
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does subsidize a lot of the low wages of the modeling industry but the other question is like what else would a woman you know that say of like twenty of limited financial means be doing in the city well there's lots of other things
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you know I mean in some ways it kind of appeals to a woman's taste if she wants to be a part of this glamorous high-end world and participated in it even for a short while there definitely there's a trade-off and we'll talk about it as
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being a win-win and their downsides clearly that they recognize that you know when you when the beautiful women go through these restaurants the food comes out but you don't get to choose what you want off of the menu it comes
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out like family-style and usually it's like the leftover stuff from the kitchen that they just have that's kind of cheaper so if it's like a sushi restaurant it's never sashimi that the beautiful women are treated to it's like
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the cucumber rolls so there's some downsides to it in that the women don't get their choice of how the night is going to unfold and where they're going to sit and what exactly they get to do but they do get a piece of this affluent
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City that they would otherwise be excluded from if some of the men are high discount rate man do you think these young women are an average high discount rate young women I suppose yes I mean so let's just say like the more the more needy a woman is or the more desperate she is and that she can't afford things on her own then I think the the more likely she will be a regular participant in this world at least for a short while until she
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establishes her own network and or you know guess it gets her career or her modeling career takes off or she goes back to school but it is a it's a kind of it's a world on offer for people who both want and need it let's say we did
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an outcome study and trace the club girls 25 years later what do you think having been a club girl would end up predicting having a lot of children having no children be happy married right right right okay so I think I think that myself I
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might be a little bit of an outlier as a as a club girl because I was much older by about ten years even though I was still referred to ubiquitously as a girl but yeah I mean I had a professional job in a career and I was I was in here
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doing for one thing but looking at the other women that are in the scene I mean it's really quite a range of of outcomes I think they it might increase the most their social capital in the sense that they get more ties to people in
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different kinds of realms than they would if they weren't a part of this world so you know if they stayed in Nebraska and didn't try try out modeling or if they tried out modeling but stayed in the models apartment and didn't go
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you know to the Hamptons and to San Tropez with the promoter I think that you know on the margins they do gain they gain those kinds of cosmopolitan experiences which might be convertible for something valuable in the future I
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think that they gain friendship ties to people that they otherwise wouldn't be exposed to you especially other women I think it is a really important scene where women can connect to each other I don't think it's that valuable of a scene where women can connect to rich men so this is a question that people always want to know like well you know don't these young women these club girls don't they like fetch a rich man for a
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husband and this is a you know kind of great dating and mating market and I think the answer to that is no why don't why not because the well-to-do men are there the attractive women are there right in a lot of other settings you see
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frequent pairings what stops it from happening in the club yeah so even though women who look like fashion models are so valuable in this scene for lending status they're devalued for the assumption that they're just beautiful
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and specifically the kind of women that are like club girls going out night after night they're seen as being unserious like this is this is not the pool of future wives this is not the pool of future business partners this is
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a pool of hookups and people have a very specific term that they use to describe girls that are very valuable to the club and to the promoters but completely devalued outside of the club and that's the party girl so people would just dismiss party
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girls as being like I'm serious you know like women women that you want to have it the party but you don't want to see them the next day yeah so that it's kind of a I don't know like being tainted by going into the club and
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taking advantage of all of the things that the club can offer to a beautiful young woman by making that trade of her beauty for access she's assumed to be just a party girl as you probably know there's some modest degree of evidence
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that attractive people are smarter on average at least so why isn't it the case that these suppose and party girls a lot of them are quite bright they figure out ways of signaling that they're smart which is not hard to do in conversation mm-hm but have some well-to-do men who maybe find it hard to meet the beautiful women they want to marry and they go to the club and they look for the signals from the really smart party girls why doesn't
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the market work that way why keep apart so it definitely can it worked that way and I think there's lots of success stories where it does work that way Melania Trump for example met Donald Trump at one of these party not not one
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of these parties in these nightclubs but she was introduced at a party that was run by her then fashion modeling agent who was actually regular and one in this whole VIP circuit so she was kind of connected to this world and that's where
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she met the you know very rich and successful businessman it by the way she also had to work pretty hard when she was introduced to the national stage to clear the reputation that she's not a party girl there was like all of this
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effort to say like Melania Trump was a good girl she didn't go out too much right she happened to be at this one party but she was not a party girl so so I can work and I think there's probably lots of stories where that does work but
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for the majority of the cases of the young women who are brought to these clubs with the promoters they it doesn't work for them because they're staying with the promoter the promoters job is to keep them at the table their primary
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being there is signaling their beauty it becomes difficult to try to forge any kind of meaningful connection when the lights are low and the music is loud you know there's people are you know talking but really like shouting into each
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other's ears and so the the setup of that kind of a situation works against any woman who's trying to show that she is like a real intellectual or she is you know it has some kind of occupational or educational prestige I have so many naive uninformed questions but why is the music so loud in these clubs I found the music loud in McDonald's right right and so clubs are kind of there also in this business of trying to manufacture and experience
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like the that annual Durkheim would call this collective effervescence like losing yourself in a moment and that's really possible when you're able to kind of tune out the other things like I don't know if somebody is feeling
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insecure about the way they dance or if somebody's not sure of what to say having really loud music that has a beat where everybody just is the same thing which is like nod to the beat that helps to kind of tune people into one another
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and it helps build up a vibe and a kind of energy and so that's the the the point is to sort of lose yourself in the music in these spaces putting aside your research interests how much fun was it for you to be in these gloves all right
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so I always say like I really wish that I had met these promoters when I was 18 because I was in New York I was studying at Hunter College for a year and if I had met the promoters then it would have been fantastic it would have gotten to
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you know travel and eat and drink for free and stay out all night and enjoy but when I was going back in into this world of New York when I was 30 31 and 32 yeah it was pretty difficult it was pretty grueling so just to put it
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in perspective the dinner with the promoters would start at around 10 o'clock at night we head to a club at around midnight and we stay there until 3:00 a.m. and the high heels are very high like the expectation is that when
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where these really high high so it's like physically hard to to keep up and be in these phases I think that for some of the younger women that's their thing like they'll of house music or they love hip hop music they love to stay out late
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get dressed up be looked at you know get drunk have drugs it's it's fantastic for for a young person it's hard to convey that kind of fun and it was hard hard for me you know being like a sober thirty year olds to also feel it now why
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don't they just pay the women to go to the clubs as you know in economics it's typically assumed a cash payment it's more efficient than free tuna rolls what stops that from happening right always asking this of the women I
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would and I would say like you know why don't we just like band together and agree to show up at the club together and then we'll each get paid a hundred dollars as opposed to going through all of these efforts of the promoter you
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know cajoling us and mobilizing us and then he gets paid a thousand dollars and the answer was always no I don't want it to be work I want it to be fun this is leisure not labor and there's all of these efforts that are expended to make
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it look like it's not work although it is I mean the women are performing a really valuable labor to the club and lots of profits are being made off of them but they don't want to think about it in terms of work and occasionally
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some promoters if they're running low on girls or they're in a desperate situation for the night they'll call a girl and and offer her say $40 or $80 to come out as paid and this is looked down on by other women is as being like an
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act of desperation it's going to ruin the fun of the night because you have to be there as opposed to wanting to be there but that seems like a funny norm so occasionally I may say to give talks I can assure you that does not take away
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from the fun that's what I do couldn't the young women all just drop this norm and they would get paid and be better off aren't they laboring under some kind of false consciousness here it is it - it's a degrading experience in some ways right the loud music so you why not on the money side get the better outcome right so it's a degrading experience if it's not fun if it's not made meaningful and the promoters that are really good at their
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job they do it really well to make it meaningful with the young women so they're not just recruiting models off the street you know giving them some free tuna rolls and then you know have it saying like wear heels and dance it's
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actually the the promoters spend a lot of time developing intimacy and connections with the young women they talk about each other as friends they use this language of friendship they see themselves as supporting one another and
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the girls are loyal to the promoter and so under these kinds of terms when the women go out with the promoter it's usually a combination of things maybe she's needing free dinner maybe she doesn't have any friends because she's new to New York City maybe she is sleeping with the promoter and she thinks that she's his girlfriend or maybe she really likes the promoter because they go to the movies every Wednesday afternoon and promoters do
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that they'll invite they'll invite girls for bowling or for picnics or to you know whatever Disneyland and so these are relationships that the promoters are cultivating which there then profiting from so it feels meaningful it doesn't
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feel degrading and for the women from whom it does feel degrading they typically don't last very long or they leave over the course of the night and they say this isn't for me let's say you sat down with one of these 20 year old
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young women and you taught them everything you know from your studies what you know about bodily capital and sociological theories of exploitation you could throw at them whatever you wanted they would read the book they would listen to your video talk with you would that change their behavior any I don't think so no I don't think so I think that they might not be too surprised even to learn the that this is a job for promoters and the promoters
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make money doing this most of them know that they didn't know how much money promoters are making they don't know how much money the clubs are making but they know that they're contributing to those profits and they know that there's this
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inequality built into it you know for some of the women that had a belief that they had the exclusive affections and attention the promoter that might come as a surprise and those are the those are the satyr moments that I discovered in this
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economy when promoters are misleading the young women into thinking that they genuinely have you know exclusive romantic or intimate intentions when often a promoter might be sleeping with two or three or several models in order
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to get them to come out with him at night so for those women they might that might be the drawing line because it's such an egregious abuse but in this world there's a widespread assumption that everybody uses everybody else I
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mean the women are using the club for the pleasures that they can get from it they're using the promoter for the pleasures they can get from him the access the promoters are using the young women the clients using the promoters
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the drawing line is when there's a perception of abuse that people have a clear sense that you know lying about being exclusively romantic would be a clear violation so that would be abusive but use is okay mutual exploitation is
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okay the margin do you think this world should be taxed or subsidized by local policy and I mean the words tax and subsidize in a broad way like noise ordinances opening hours their implicit policy decisions that help her harm
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these ventures what should the policy stance be okay well this is kind of out there I think that as as a labor issue this shows the really unequal and unfair terms of the modeling industry in particular and the modeling industry is
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generating so much profit for the club industry I mean the these unpaid women in the modeling industry they're also generating huge like untold profits all of these other industries that benefit from their presence in the clubs like
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finance or real estate where all of these networks of powerful businessmen get consolidated in part you know softened through the presence of unpaid women from the modeling industry so I think that there could be some case to
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be made that fashion unpaid fashion models or low paid fashion models are doing enormous unpaid labor for all of these other hugely profitable industries where disproportionately the profits are going to men so I could see
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redistribution working in that direction but if you can't talk them out of what they're doing given everything you know and you would be the person to try to do it right right is it that you're you know paternalistic or maternal istic
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towards them or you don't want to respect their preferences or I mean how do you see this at the meta level I think that people participate in their own exploitation all the time I mean you see this in all kinds of different forms
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of work as academics like yeah you get paid for your talks but you're doing a lot of work that's unpaid and uncompensated and often unrecognized as well like all of the service work all of the other things that academia runs on
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it also a lot of this is free labor that we give up because we believe in it and we find it validating and someone should tell us not to do it but we'd probably still do it anyway because it's validating so I think that exploitation
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works best when it's pleasurable and when it's made meaningful but that doesn't mean that the inequities can't be challenged at a structural level if I had a subjective level people consent to them whose evidence say that academics
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are left-leaning dentists tend to lean more toward the right what are the politics of fashion models on average but they're they're young this is a population of people who are young and often you know politically unexperienced
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and often not educated especially for women the age for a fashion model is typically they're late teenage years into their 20s this is the company this is the age for you know going to college so so yeah um I would have to say that
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they are amorphous and you know perhaps they're leaning left if for no other reason because it's a creative industry and they're exposed to more creatives and Bohemians who tend to lean to the left or tend to be more progressive why
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is the scouting model so common for finding women who might be fashioning fashion models there's a scout he goes up to a woman he says you have that look come with me why are things done that way I think that's happening less and
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less in a digital and globally connected world so it used to be that Scouts would travel all across the like nine time zones of Russia and go to these beauty pageants across all these different little cities and you know pluck someone
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from obscurity and send her to Paris but now there's so many small modeling agencies or even even just women with Wi-Fi connections and instagrams all around the world that they can email their pictures directly to a scout who's
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based in New York so I think that that model is starting to cut down where the professional paid Scout whose job is to go on the hunt will become less and less or is becoming less and less but that person will just look through pictures on their computer they're still scouting but in a different form but isn't there some physical presence or charisma that doesn't come through in a photograph and you need a good scout for that because
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modeling may be mainly isn't even about looks right so the thing that models sell in the market is called a look but you're definitely right that it's part physicality but part personality and that comes through in a picture it comes
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through in a walk and also a conversation I think a lot can be captured in video and zoom and Instagram so you know I think there are ways to capture that but a scowl maybe who gets a picture and gets the videos that they
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like from somebody would eventually need to go and meet them in their part of the world it also probably you know depending if it's a woman in her age to meet her parents as well and to develop a rapport so that someone would feel
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good about sending their teenage daughter to a new market how good a scout would you be a fashion models well I'm a little bit shy I think when I to go and talk to people so I think that a good Scout they have to have a good eye
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that's the primary thing to to see that what they would call like a diamond in the rough I could do that I think that any model that's gone through the system and is exposed to this kind of look over and over can make these assessments and
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to kind of see things together how different features come together but I think that Scouts also I've spent some time with them they have a kind of ease and talking to young people and they have an ease and talking with their
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parents and I I just don't have that I think I would feel awkward or like creepy or in some way like offering false dreams that I think probably I would have serious hesitations about trying to pull somebody into the modeling industry if a good quality Scout goes up to a 17 year old young woman and approaches are about being a model I mean what's the median or modal reaction to that okay so I know this from interviewing the the models for my
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first book it surprised its surprised because I say I said so a scout has to be able to identify a look and to be able to see how somebody who is not in the context of the fashion modeling industry could be you know really great
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under certain kinds of conditions and so these are usually young women's their scouting stories are like you know I was just coming out of soccer practice or I was just getting off of like an overnight airplane and I had braces and
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you know I was the ugly duckling and yeah nobody nobody looked twice at me in middle school and then here's this person you know saying I should be a model in London or something so yeah surprise but do ninety percent just tell the guy
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to buzz off or what do they do I think if it makes I mean that surprise can come with like fear that this is some it might be shady it could also come yeah with the sense of like disinterest I think that a lot of people in the
36:43
modeling industry they have a couple of experiences with getting scouted so the first time might be complete surprise and like yeah this might be creepy or like buzz off not interested right now but if it happens again or a third time
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then it the idea starts to start to develop that maybe there's something to it and I was yeah did you respond so sorry having a couple of times in at the mall that a scout would would come approached me which state is this yeah
37:12
so I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta sent a lot of diamonds I fashioned malls in Atlanta and my peers and so yeah Scout would come up and say like all you I'd love for you to come into the office and you know we could probably work if
37:25
you're interested - have you ever thought about becoming a model but by that point by that time that that had happened I was already told by people and like my friends in high school that you know I was skinny enough that I
37:37
looked like one of these girls in these magazines and I should consider it so it was already kind of on my mind that it was something that I wanted to do and then of course my mom she sent me a Vogue magazine 1993 Cindy Crawford was
37:52
on the cover I still have it and I and I just got really into whatever fashion modeling was I didn't fully understand but I was like I want to be this do you regret having been a model no not at all I regret that I didn't use it in a smarter way
38:12
because I was I think that you know I started traveling to Milan in Japan when I was 19 and 20 and so that's still quite a young age I think like mentally and emotionally to kind of pick up and go somewhere but if I sometimes feel
38:31
like if I had had I don't know better if I knew what I know now you know back then I could have built stronger connections with interesting people like I could have tried harder to understand the creative side of producing fashion yeah
38:50
I could have tried tarted to get involved in photography which I found interesting but it was always kind of on the margins of so it it opens up all these doors that you know frankly at 18 I wasn't really capable of seeing it's a
39:03
significant subset of models who at least to me appear to be distant unapproachable and they look pissed off why is that there's a wonderful dissertation at the University of Amsterdam called my fashion models don't smile don't they so
39:20
it depends which segment of the fashion modeling market we're talking about so if you look in your catalogs that you know used to come in the mail that now are mostly online models are pretty relatable that they they have the kind
39:32
of look that would be described as girl-next-door or like a classic apple pie and you see a lot of smiles when people are selling things directly in the catalog or commercial realm on television commercials as well really
39:42
relatable people aspirational in the way they look they look good but they're connecting they're smiling and they're not meant to be intimidating unlike the editorial side of fashion which is like the catwalk or the magazines especially
39:56
the vogue magazines these are the kinds of looks of models that are projecting what people in the fashion world think of as being in fashion and those kinds of models almost never smile there's almost never a smile on the catwalk it's
40:12
remarkable it's supposed to be all about showing the clothes and projecting this aspirational distant kind of beauty that is not meant to be relatable if I could add you know just a lesson from the art world is that the more the
40:28
more people and the more kind of socially different types of people that a work of art is meant to relate to the lesser its value so in the editorial end of the market the fact that your average consumer doesn't get that kind of look
40:43
doesn't doesn't get that cold distant on smiling body your face that's kind of deliberate it's not meant to make sense to you it's meant to make sense to like the Anna Wintour's of the world now when your work on modeling in Japan you once
40:56
wrote that Western female models in Japan or often portrayed as quote silly harmless and incompetent why is that equilibrium in Japan so yeah I'm out in Japan and these are just some observations I mean I don't know if it's
41:13
I didn't do a comparison with the local models like Japanese models but indeed there were lots of observations I took of the Western models coming into Japan and doing all kinds of just bizarre silly things infantilizing things I
41:32
think that there's some interpretivist cultural studies that I reference in that paper that suggested this is a way of I don't know diffusing or yeah diffusing the Western hegemony or maybe maybe bridging the divide between you
41:50
know Western beauty and Eastern Beauty but I'm really not sure but that also might account for what you call the models passivity in the Japanese market well yeah but it's really the terms of the work in the Japanese market it produces passive passivity unlike anything I've ever experienced because the the language barrier and the the ways that models would usually have a little bit of control in the casting situation is to talk to show their
42:20
personality is you know to connect to relate and it's really difficult in the Japanese market because Western models not only do they not speak Japanese in most Japanese people do not speak English the fashion world and lots of
42:32
other worlds so the solution there is that every agency has like a manager whose job is also to drive the models to their castings and then introduce the models to the clients and then clients talk in Japanese and the model stands there and
42:48
then the manager introduces the next one so it's like a just a very weird kind of passive experience it also meant that a lot of my time in Tokyo was spent in the back of a van being driven around with like Ukranian teenagers looking out the window in the middle of these tracks we usually have a segment overrated versus underrated I'll toss out a few notions you tell me what you think are you the importance of what sociologists call
43:18
loose ties overrated or underrated is there an option to say it's like appropriate of course yeah I think this is appropriate I mean I think that I would be either some somewhat doing a disservice to my discipline if I were to say that it's been overrated because it is one of the major findings within economic sociology that's kind of continually shown that there all these advantages for having loose ties arms-length ties the French sociologist
43:54
Pierre Bourdieu overrated or underrated Oh again I have to be careful here because you know one of my fields is cultural sociology again write a paper without citing the guy and I really would say it's a very 1970s 1980s French
44:13
notion of hierarchy that is itself hierarchical very limited he covers gender only much later yeah it probably doesn't even apply to the rest of France yet truer true or false it's true yeah it's true and there have been important correctives
44:29
to that but I think that it was a huge contribution to insert culture into class hierarchy so everybody pays homage for that reason the movie Zoolander overrated or underrated underrated and we should all still watch Zoolander this
44:46
is a fantastic treatise on like gender and the impossibilities of male Beauty it's one of my favorites Miami Beach is it actually fun overrated what do you think overrated yeah over it overrated although there's you know pockets of it
45:02
that I think are probably more interesting but they the kind of glossy glitzy glamorous part of Miami Beach totally overrated I mean it's your thing of like all glamour bad food Osaka Japan what do you think um it's been like 15 years by yeah yeah I like those little octopus fried balls under right okay you didn't remember it would have to be overrated right REM the musical group you went to school in Athens Georgia yeah underrated there yeah
45:39
although you're at right now I think that well because of that hit song it's the end of the world as we know it they're they're having a moment coming back perhaps unfortunate champagne I don't like it am I wrong am I missing
45:52
something data signaling so much of your work is about signaling do you have to conclude champagne is overrated I have to conclude is overrated but there is something really delightful about it as a party good because you can shake it
46:06
and spray it without like destroying clothes unlike say red wine and it's bubbly and you know this is kind of mad it has a sort of fun magical quality so yeah on the whole overrated but well overrated because you can get all those
46:21
things with Prosecco here's a question from a reader and I quote quote how has her own beauty and glamour influenced her career academic career does she find beauty based biases in academia either positive or negative end quote yeah well
46:38
I think it looks matter everywhere in academia is no exception in my own experience there's this double-edged sword for women's beauty so some studies show that you know it's important for women especially to conform to these traditional notions of
46:56
beautiful but they can't overdo it in the professional workplace so some makeup is appropriate but like too much eyeliner is considered you know to sexual and inappropriate so yeah I tried to balance that for instance even before
47:11
I got my job at Boston University I was coached by my adviser to dress you know in a fairly drab way to really try to assert my authority and and to distance myself from the femininity and the beauty which was kind of always going to be plaguing me because of my work and because the fact that I was a model so I tried to distance it as I could you know dye that question though for sure I think at an interactional level having having beauty
47:41
definitely eases the way for for people to respond more favorably to me because of that halo effect of beauty so you know maybe people are more more likely to answer an email or to agree to a meeting or the meeting will go smoothly
48:01
and people will listen more to what I say because I look the way they do I'll find that out I mean that questions to be continued because as we know as women age they so-called lose their bodily capital aging is comes with a decline of
48:18
beauty for women and so yeah I'll have to answer that and say you know 10 or 15 years what kinds of emotional labor do women professors have to perform that maybe the male professors do not yeah this is like a perennial conversation
48:33
that I have with my women colleagues about the number of students that ask for exceptions in their grades especially of younger faculty young women faculty the number of students that open up with their problems and you
48:51
know we are more likely I think to keep tissues in our offices for crying students then like our male colleagues so there's there's that yeah just kind of being being a crutch to students and being seen as somebody that's more
49:07
relatable by virtue of age and by gender means that we have more of these kinds of drains on our I don't know emotional work than male colleagues I don't know if you if you would agree or if you find that do you also keep tissues in your
49:22
office I don't but you know my office is so crowded I think actually everything's in there and probably that includes some tissues I think if you broadly as being anthropological even though you're sociologists and if you if you view academia with your anthropological hat on what about it seems most comical or most stupid to you or just strange and bizarre the stranger bazaar well it's a really interesting question there's so many
49:53
things about it I guess the way that it portends to be so meritocratic I mean thinking here about academia and the world of professors the way yeah the way that it's very meritocratic and ostensibly within sociology were so
50:12
attuned to inequalities by gender and by class and by race like that's the bread and butter of our discipline and yet we reproduce inequities all the time I mean not in the least with this notion of the disproportionate amount of emotional
50:27
work of women faculty disproportionate ways that women faculty and people of color do more service work certain kinds of hierarchies get reproduced in the hiring all the time you know so even though we're supposedly all about equity it's just the fact that you know somebody who's tied to a prominent person or an Ivy University will catch our eye and so we're starting and we have now discussions about how to safeguard against those biases but yeah
50:59
there's kind of a bizarre thing the way we reproduce inequalities all the time if we're concerned about inequality including for women who have a childbearing cycle shouldn't we just abolish tenure right and or maybe not
51:16
abolish it but maybe change the terms of it so that the clock doesn't completely overlap with the so-called biological clock for women who want to have families so perhaps there could be a way to lengthen it or pause it or start it
51:32
you know in a way that makes it fit better with with having kids there's also a couple of you know yeah so I had my kids right when I got tenure I had my first child she arrived right after I received my positive tenure decision I
51:51
didn't plan it that way but it worked out really luckily but I remember in graduate school a couple of people had kids in grad school and I was thinking like no this is a ridiculous it's not the right plan like I could never
52:05
imagine having kids in grad school but actually it does make sense to in grad school you have a lot more control over your time you're a lot more flexible fewer demands and you can kind of stretch your grad school clock in a way
52:18
so in some ways I sometimes looking back I think like that's also an option to maybe loosen up the expectation that that women have kids after their careers are all stitched up because that's what I followed and it it worked out for me
52:34
but it can't work out for everyone and it also was quite a big stress for those six years if you think about the question like what is your unified theory of you you have this early career as a fashion model and your current
52:49
career as an academic and also as an author they're all winner-take-all sectors do you think of yourself as in some sense you keep on doing the same thing in different areas or do you think of your current career as a rebellion against what you did before so
53:09
I should say I was a really good student all throughout high school in college and I got into the modeling kind of as a as a side job and then I I found a way through sociology to turn my experiences and modeling into an academic project and I could kind of even see when I was in college reading these ethnographies at the workplace because I took this great class on the sociology of work I could see like wow someone should really
53:35
do this of fashion modeling and like I could be the Barbara Ehrenreich you know in sociology of like fashion in high status and so in some ways I I've always been a scholar I've always been I mean I've always been a student first and
53:51
foremost my my alignment was an academia and I was always looking searching for the status and the the winner-take-all hierarchy of academia and modeling kind of got me there and you enjoy the thrill of winner-take-all markets yes I know I
54:09
mean I can't say that I'm like a winner in the academic field I mean yes having good a good your job is because I know that they're increasingly in short supply but in some ways it's such a it's less volatile of a
54:25
world than these cultural production fields me it's the complete opposite job model once you get a tenure track job and once you get tenure especially you kind of can't be fired I mean barring you know some real problems but I mean it's lifetime
54:39
security in an age in the workforce in which this is just shrinking it's so rare to have this kind of privilege of lifetime job security and really like knock on wood because as the universities are facing these challenges
54:51
it just entered my mind in the last month of like wow what would happen if I didn't have this lifetime job security that I've counted on but it's a complete opposite fashion modeling is a 180 where you can be dismissed you know from one
55:04
day to the next and your fortunes can change for the better or for the worse so yeah it's a winner-take-all maybe like in terms of prestige but once you're in the tenured world it's pretty study there's a common perception that
55:20
Korean culture is relatively oppressive for young women there's a certain way they're expected to look or maybe to have plastic surgery yeah you agree with that and if so why is it yeah and I saw this on the question like I thought that
55:36
maybe you're asking me at first because my you know my dad is half Korean so my grandmother it's Korean she was born and raised in Hawaii but but in any case so yeah I never been to Korea and so my Korean connections actually really I
55:51
know from the literature but so to your question it's a common perception that it's a plastic surgery is oppressive but I think make from my understanding you know there's an opposite reading which is that it's really validating and and
56:09
really quite pleasurable to modify the appearance so in your write in South Korea it's it leads the world in double eyelid surgery to make that eyelid fold that is typical of Western shape I but less so of an Asian shaped eye and so this is often read as like oh this is like internalized white Western hegemony on to Asian people but I actually think it's a bit more complicated than that there's a certain kind of beauty they is
56:39
really popular around because throughout Asia because of the rise of k-pop stars and this kind of Asian beauty has a very specific kind of face that's like very pale skin with a certain kind of makeup regime around it and yes that the eyes
56:57
but I think it would be hard to say that anybody is looking in Asia to the west as the beauty standard I think within Asia people are looking to kpop is a beauty standard now and you know in the u.s. like there's all kinds of things
57:12
that could be read as oppressive to the that people do like hair extensions and these um eyelash extensions you know to make really long and dark eyelashes and all kinds of all kinds of practices that when you actually talk to people they're
57:27
very validating or they feel pleasurable where do those pleasures come from sure Marxist could say that it's all false consciousness but I think that there's probably lots more interesting answers in America today for women what do you
57:42
think distinguishes most clearly notions of upper class beauty and lower class beauty yeah alright so I think that upper class beauty upper class bodies are pretty uniformly thin and that's you know the the economy of plenty whoever
58:05
has money can afford quality food and getting to the gym as opposed to an economy of scarcity having a kind of plump you know a rotund belly would be a sign of having extra money or of wealth so yeah I definitely thinness and if you
58:21
look at the rates of obesity and overweight you there's a very clear divide like upward people who are upper class tend to be thinner my people who are lower class tend to be larger so that's one kind of clear distinction
58:36
otherwise you know all of the things that are signals of beauty tend to be things that people who have money can afford to invest in so straight teeth clear skin you know blonde highlights or just kind of shiny hair kept up nails
58:55
clothing signifies a lot I mean these are all things that can be people with money can work on themselves to achieve for a very last segment return to what I call the Ashley Mears production function me who first spotted your
59:10
talent as an academic okay so there there were two of them at the University of Georgia in the sociology department it was William Finlay he's a sociologist of work and and also James Coverdell they wrote a book on headhunters and so
59:27
they were attuned to questions of non-standard work for Carius work and when I I took the sociology of work class with James Coverdale and he was like yeah you should do this like a sociology of work about fashion models
59:41
definitely then he put me in touch with that with William and I was yeah I was just emailing with them last week like they they stayed my mentors for a long time and if you're looking for promising young sociology or anthropologists for
59:55
that matter what's the non obvious signal you look for yes hard work they should be smart and so on but beneath the surface what strikes you if somebody is read a lot and if they've read eclectic things and they have that kind
1:00:09
of breadth that strikes me because that means that they're curious and interested in a lot of different things and that they can bring that to whatever is our topic they end up landing on what's the weirdest set of things you
1:00:22
like to read or have read other than about fashion modeling in the party and like you know guidebooks for restaurants and Economist's right so I read a lot of ethnographies within sociology that's probably not a surprise that's kind of
1:00:39
within my field but I'm also reading now because I have two kids I like to read advice books for parents you know ranging from kind of kitschy ones on up to like from economists on like what the data say are the best child
1:00:55
practices so that's where I'm kind of in now I mean yeah having having kids maybe not a surprise kind of put me in this like parenting literature and what's the best advice you either have read or would offer to other people on parenting
1:01:08
to people on parenting sure you've read all these books you have an opinion tell the parents out there I said maybe I still need some advice but what do you say so usually that kind of question would invite into an individualistic
1:01:28
answer and that's the problem with the literature that it's all like you as an individual parent what you should or shouldn't do and you know maybe because I'm a sociologist but but yeah my advice for parents in this country is to
1:01:43
mobilize because it's a complete crisis that we don't have paid parental leave that there's no state supports for daycare I think that that's one of the tragic but really important things about the pandemic right now is that it's it's
1:01:56
revealing just how difficult it is to combine a career with family and the United States is just exceptional in how unfriendly it is for family policy yeah mobilize what is your most unusual writing or work habit ok these are
1:02:19
interesting questions so I used to have something I used to have it like a pretty consistent flow before I had kids that got that got disrupted and that's what a lot of people say is like they write in like these certain chunks of
1:02:30
time day after day and that's how they're able to accomplish it but so here's a weird habit that I picked up in college I mean it stayed with me if I eat something sweet in college I would munch on like a box of Dunkin Donuts to
1:02:44
get through a term paper and now I find like whatever cookie is my kids have no like I always have you know some sweet junk food this is probably not really great advice there for anybody but it's just my habit now just to the audience I
1:03:00
would like again to recommend Ashley's book it is called again very important people status and beauty in the global party circuit it is quality research fantastic fun to read I learned a great deal from it I think it will be a big hit definitely one of my favorite books of this year or indeed would be of years past and Ashley thank you very much for joining us and best of luck with publication thank you thank you so much again