The Wing Is Dead
A woman’s social club showed what can go wrong when great conceits meet hypercapitalism.
Private clubs have been a part of New York life since before Edith Wharton picked up a pen. But these social institutions had gotten stodgy over the better part of a century, until the Europeans breathed new life into the concept and—as with smallpox blankets and colonialism—brought these revitalized clubs across the pond in the early aughts. Suddenly, Manhattan had Soho House, and then Norwood House and NeueHouse, and ceaseless humblebrags under the guise of invitations to “have drinks at my club.” Certainly, I—a member of Norwood at the time—did my fair share of it.
Then, at some point in 2016, I caught wind of something new: a club opening by and for women. Exclusively. Housed in a swath of the Flatiron District known as the “Ladies’ Mile,” The Wing was promoted as a throwback with a modern twist: Where the well-heeled Gibson Girls once went to shop and socialize, the modern-day New York woman would work and socialize and pit-stop in between working and socializing. I was intrigued by the idea, applied, and—like a true New Yorker, ill-content with just letting the cards fall where they may—called around town to anyone I knew even tangentially attached to the project until I was certain that my membership card was en route. (It was.)
The Wing was, for me, a short-lived experiment. After the first year or so of the club’s existence, I let my membership lapse. The Wing proved short-lived itself—a project that first imploded in spectacular fashion in 2020, before finally closing its doors last week, holds up a mirror to the possibilities and pitfalls of hypercapitalism.
To start: Beyond the “flex” of belonging to something, there is, if you can afford it, a lot of practical benefit to being a member of a social club in New York. To be a New Yorker in the pre-2020 “before times” meant you were likely a busy person with time to kill between appointments. Places like The Wing and its predecessors gave members the gift of convenient and comfortable real estate: a place to grab a snack, send an email, or kill an hour before the next meeting, or simply a location at which to take said meeting. If you were a freelancer or an entrepreneur, these clubs provided the added advantage of a workspace to call your own, to say nothing of networking opportunities.
At its inception, The Wing’s founders, Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan, tapped into all of this and something more. The tremendous press around the club’s launch highlighted the space’s amenities, such as storage lockers, femme beauty products in the powder rooms, and an alternative to changing for a meeting in a Starbucks bathroom. But it was the something more that, in its earliest (and, I would argue, best) days, made The Wing special, and its eventual demise worth writing about.
The Wing understood the power of the girl crush, and the uniquely exciting premise of sharing space with and getting to know other fabulous women.
And they were fabulous! I met, in those first few months, brilliant and talented authors, journalists, artists, actors, philanthropists, and businesswomen. The inaugural community manager—a genius connector—would periodically email you to make introductions to other members whose interests or goals might align with yours. The Wing’s book club is, most certainly, one of the primary reasons I am a writer now, and I consider many of the women I met there friends to this day.
And yet, less than a year in, I realized I’d been bamboozled. I thought I’d joined a social club, only to discover that I was spending a couple hundred bucks a month to be a part of a Millennial-pink WeWork with ambitions to take over the world.
And as a member, you very much felt those ambitions in action. First came the branding and the corporate tie-ins: The Handmaid’s Tale swag from Hulu and “Girls doing whatever the fuck they want” keychains. Then came the opening of a second location that looked not quite like the first, but not quite unlike it either; then the highly public venture capital; the pivot from “social club” to “co-working space”; and, of course, the release of its own glossy magazine. The products in the bathroom began to feel less like nice amenities than marketing partnerships at work, and free books and giveaways less like perks than evidence that you, the member, were being commodified as a “target demographic.”
It became impossible to ignore that The Wing’s diversity was oppressively performative. Feminism wasn’t just an ethos, but fodder for slogans to go on a tote—specifically, a tote that could be purchased from The Wing and then carried around to signal your feminism.
After a short while, I felt less like an insider in a community than a data point to be used to secure more funding for more expansion. I’m sad about that. Because the company’s original idea—a fabulous space for fabulous women—was refreshing, both in theory and in practice. Perhaps The Wing was, like so many other ventures of that era, the victim of girlbossing. Or perhaps it fell victim to a phenomenon I think plagues too many entrepreneurial ventures in America: growth obsession. It is no longer “enough” for a founder to build a better mousetrap; now, you must build it, grow it, and sell it or take it public. Oh, and mythologize yourself in the process.
It can be challenging to hold true to an original vision when you blow it up to 100 times its original size. Distortion—of intent, of values, of quality—is inevitable. With remote work on the rise, social clubs have been growing in popularity here in New York. And with the decimation of Roe v. Wade, the importance of gathering, connecting, and convening with women has never felt more vital. But the current stakes have also laid bare the hollowness of the “girlboss” era and its empty promises of commercialized feminism. Perhaps there will be an iteration of a women’s club that sees the value proposition in building a femme-identifying community versus one that simply commodifies it.