Reading · Nikole’s Substack

ZZ’s Miami on Superbowl Sunday: I’m seated across from a man, about 40, wearing a Saint Laurent varsity jacket and a massive NFL championship ring on his pinky. He’s not an athlete but an investor who tells me he likes Miami because it’s a community of expats. No one is known for one thing, everyone’s crafting their own image, he describes. Miami, the new American frontier.

Across from us is a table of couples — perfectly manicured, glistening women on the arms of insanely jacked men. A procession of Birkins, Picotins, and Chanels line the back of their booth. I have never seen such a concentrated room of conventionally attractive people.

A tall man with gelled thick hair makes his rounds with a doodle in his arms. He is the manager presumably. He sits down with two women in their mid-40s, glossy foreheads, pearls dripping into plastic breasts. Serious patrons. A pair of kisses for them both, some laughs, a round of champagne. He moves on, they return to their phones. Next to them, two men, heavily tatted and tanned, sit looking at everything and everyone but the sporting event projected in front of them.

I feel as though I’ve seen every guy here on Raya.

What about ZZ’s? I ask my interviewee. His eyes glaze over me at two beautiful blondes walking in stratospheric Loubs. Yes, I like it here especially. You see people on repeat, even if they’re not your friends per se. Third or fourth connections. It’s comforting.

I’ve heard this same sentiment from patrons of member’s clubs in New York. One of Casa Cip’s members reflects: When I go there, I recognize people, which I love. Even if I don’t chat with them, it feels comfortable.

Member’s clubs offer the promise of comfort through homogeneity. Birds of a feather flock together to their walled-off gardens — private, exclusive, but not anonymous. The proliferation of such spaces, especially in New York recently — Casa Tua on the UES, Casa Cruz in the 60s, Chez Margaux in Meatpacking, Maxime’s, SVB, and more opening this year — is testament to the desire for community, unified by and built on status.

Playgrounds that offer the sanctity of comfort and homogeneity through social stratification cannot exist when everyone is let in. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the rise of member’s clubs is concurrent with a visible, cultural shift of high society away from the progressive left towards the right: a return to convention not only in 2000s-era skinniness and stilettos, but in attitudes.

A fresh Harvard grad and member of Chez Margaux describes: It’s locked in…if you belong or at least have friends who belong. It’s really the hot spot. Everyone knows it too when you’re in there…there’s this kind of union, this unspoken agreement among everyone there.

I get up to go to the bathroom. I walk through the art deco interior and keenly feel the eyes of men, mostly, some women too, on me. Overt, unabashed stares. I don’t know if it’s my especially petite figure today — thin from two days of partying and not much eating — caricatured by the godsend of a push-up bra I’ve chosen for this occasion. Or if their stares are of amusement from my visibly out-of-place grunge jeans and R13 stompers. Whatever it is, it feels good. I gloat.

Spaces of this sort are built and designed to induce this exact feeling. Their very architecture supports it — intimate, seductive rooms where you’re constantly on display. There is a Russian word — naslazhdatsya — that I adore. It translates most simply as “to indulge,” gluttonously in something sweet and pleasurable. It is often used to refer to self-indulgence.

We bask in our own image, crafted meticulously, and affirmed by the spaces we are granted admission into. Member’s clubs capitalize on this feeling — those that will withstand the test of the time will capture and maintain it.

I exit the bathroom having taken my selfies — a cab driver’s daughter from South Brooklyn frolicking with the upper echelons of American society.

I walk by the two gilded ladies in their booth, glued to their phones. The whole scene is cold, pristine, and done up — starkly different from what I’d witnessed at NY’s new Funny Bar. There, tables flowed into one another, people hopped from their seats to their neighbor’s, a hedge fund analyst in Zegna chatted with a rockstar, birthday cake was passed around, and no phones were in sight.

Funny Bar was a far cry from ZZ’s, whose promise of comfort breeds a homogeneity that becomes desperately boring.