Much of the discussion of the massive economic inequality that characterizes American society in the twenty-first century stays in the realm of abstract, bloodless statistics. We don’t often get much of a sense of the texture of life for capitalism’s winners, nor of the variety of little-understood forms of labor that make those super high-end lifestyles possible.

Sociologist Ashley Mears’s book, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit, gives us some of that texture through a fascinating — often disturbing — examination of the garish world of the global, ultrarich party circuit. Mears is a former model and the author of a previous book, Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model, on labor conditions for models. Through contacts that she made writing that first book, she joined the club promoters and models (“girls” in promoters’ parlance) who serve as something like human set pieces for the dream worlds of the superrich.

She chronicles the carefully choreographed displays of waste, such as bottle service and dance floor champagne wars, and unpacks the complicated and rigid social hierarchies that undergird them. It’s a book about the cascading effects that their bottomless appetites for extravagance have on industries and on the entire society beyond these clubs. While growing millions of Americans struggle to survive stagnant wages and ever-rising costs of living, this parallel universe of the ultrarich is characterized by a kind of luxury consumption arms race growing ever more wasteful and ever more self-indulgent.