Thread by @moorehn

I saw a TikTok from a young woman about how she paid $1000 to go to a yacht event in Monaco and people invited her to parties on some yachts "because I was dressed to impress...you can dress to show you bring value to the yacht."

And I don't know if anyone will tell her that cute dresses are not why young women are invited to yacht parties.

She's getting cooked in the comments -- but only because other young women don't think the dress is cute, not because anyone is pointing out the obvious fact that inviting young women with no money onto yachts is the equivalent of "ladies night" at a bar. The young women -- in any dress -- are there to bring the old men in.

I think this is what happens when young women are told that Old Money is an aesthetic you can buy through clothes, rather than a set of rigid and unspoken social codes that you instinctually understand.

It's also a result of the current nonsense that's been going around for years about "high-value women" or "high-value men" where "high-value" is a euphemism for how much money they have. There's no understanding that people are not their net worth.

she ends up going down a narcissistic spiral of how her choice of a (mass-market) dress has marked her as worthy of being on a yacht, and that the key to being in "high-value spaces" is how women dress....

...when in fact she -- like so many other young women -- was just chosen as sexual chum for shady rich sharks. Who, by the way, are experts at reading people's social class no matter what they're wearing.

Anyway this is an eternal game (the Audrey Tatou movie "Priceless" is about this milieu in Monaco) but one eternal truth is that young women should not be paying $1000 for a ticket to be taken advantage of by the kind of people who go to yacht events.

Here's the very basic dress and a hint of her behavior on the yacht, where she dances by stomping around and whipping her arms in the air like someone in a New Jersey bar (no offense to New Jersey bars!). The baseball cap was a welcome gift from the company selling yachts (which, again, wants young women there in the same way that car shows used to have young women) and she doesn't know not to wear it.

Naïveté is nothing new but I can foresee a lot of Zoomers getting scammed or taken advantage of because they don't know how to function away from their phones. People have agendas, bbs. Be careful out there.

By the way, the dress also costs close to $1000. It's great for a garden party in Westchester, but is not a look for Monaco or yachts.

Another indicator of how young people brought up on TikToks about the "Old Money Aesthetic" and "high-value women" can't
contextualize appropriate dressing or know that just because something is expensive doesn't mean it's appropriate in all social spaces.

It reminds me of the (great) movie Le Divorce, with Kate Hudson carrying her little red Kelly bag from her rich French lover to the grocery store and book readings, and he has to remind her that it has a certain place.

People make fun of fashion as a frivolous pursuit but the truth is that fashion is inextricably caught up with economics, finance, politics, class, social codes and social belonging, and so many people who think it's just about some fabric end up crashing head-first into that realization one way or another eventually.

We didn't roast the men of Monaco here but they also deserve some scrutiny

I should also point out, out of fairness, that no one in Monaco is "old money" anyway. It's a young country and a tax haven, and it attracts those who like brash displays of wealth. Another reason the "Old Money Aesthetic" flops there.

I think this is really smart and sums up the fundamental problem. No shame to anyone who is in sex work or "sugar daddy" situations, but telling thousands of regular TikTok followers to do these things to be "high-value" is fundamentally misleading them about what the point and the transaction is. It's also incredibly dangerous for young women, especially if they're alone as this creator was.