Party girls with a purpose: Building their own brands

NEW YORK: It was 9 p.m. on Halloween and already a crowd of A-list revelers and the photographers who love them were inside the West Side lounge Bungalow 8. Stepping through the club’s velvet ropes, Fabiola Beracasa, the sexy, voluble socialite who is the Venezuelan-born daughter of Veronica Hearst, was dressed as Medusa in a made-to-order serpentine headdress, glittery body paint, freaky white contact lenses and gold-sequined hot pants.As the photographers sprung into action, Beracasa, one of the party’s six hosts, gamely struck a variety of poses, momentarily jumping atop a leather banquette in her 6-inch, or 15-centimeter, platform heels.

After descending from her perch, she slinked through the crush of bodies to chat with her friend Tinsley Mortimer, another much-photographed girl- about-town, who was dressed as Raggedy Ann in red-and-white- striped stockings.

A few hours later, the photographs were up on Web sites about Manhattan party life, providing fodder to bloggers and glossy magazines that document the social set’s every clothing change. It was another night in the life of the ambitious post-deb set, during a week that included a host of similar photo ops: the Met museum Young Friends Benefit Dance, the Princess Grace Foundation gala, parties at the Jimmy Choo boutique and the Gramercy Park Hotel.

So many parties, so many party pictures. Yet to hear the newest wave of socialites tell it, the businesslike grind of going out nightly is increasingly a platform for creating a business.

Women like Beracasa (creative director of an estate jewelry company), Mortimer (designer of her own handbag line) and many others are exploring a new socialite end game – one in which they become a brand with mainstream recognition (extra points awarded for an actual logo).

Aggressively milking the fame they acquire through their irrepressible urge to dress up and be photographed, they are spinning off businesses that may one day provide nest eggs for the time an inherited fortune runs dry or a Palm Beach marriage goes down in flames, or simply as a means of personal fulfillment.

The New York Times

see more at thesocialitelife.com featuring Fabiola Bercasa, Amelia Wahl, Joanie Oakley, Byrdie Bell, Amanda Swift, Tinsley Mortimer, Cameron Owens, Michele DiSpina, Lucinda Snell, Casey Johnson, Megan Simmons, Anna Marie Bein, Jennifer Styne, Paris Hilton, Gloria Van Der Waal, Victoria Traina, Natalia Pzerymskc