idea was born in a Starbucks bathroom. Audrey
Gelman, then a 28-year-old public-relations
savant and New York personality, was tired of
dashing between meetings in New York and
Washington, charging her phone in hotel lob-
bies and freshening up in the public restrooms of
fast-casual chains. She envisioned a kind of fem-
inine pit stop she would call Refresh — a private
club where women could blow their hair out and
check their email in comfort and peace.
But in time, Gelman’s aspirations widened.
She realized, she told The New York Observer
in 2016, that carving out space for women was
a ‘‘subtly radical’’ idea. Gelman partnered with
Lauren Kassan, a 28-year-old director of business
development at the fi tness start-up ClassPass.
They began plotting the club’s fi rst location: a
bright penthouse in New York’s Flatiron district
along a historic stretch known as the Ladies’ Mile,
where, in the late 19th and beginning of the 20th
century, upscale women could be seen shopping
unchaperoned. They enlisted the historian Alexis
Coe to research early American women’s clubs
and traced a line between those eff orts and their
own. When the club opened its doors in October
2016 — under a new name, the Wing — they styled
it as ‘‘a place for women on their way.’’ In its fi nal
form, Gelman said on the Recode podcast last
year, the Wing is intended as a ‘‘women’s utopia.’’
Stepping into a Wing location feels a little like
being sealed inside a pop-feminist Biodome. It is
pitched as a social experiment: what the world
would look like if it were designed by and for
women, or at least millennial women with mean-
ingful employment and a cultivated Instagram
aesthetic. The Wing looks beautiful and expen-
sive, with curvy pink interiors that recall the
womb. The thermostat hovers around 72 degrees,
to satisfy women’s higher temperature needs. A
color-coded library features books by female
authors only. There are well-appointed pump
rooms, as well as private phone booths named
after Lisa Simpson, Anita Hill and Lady Macbeth.
There is an in-house cafe, the Perch, serving wines
sourced from female vintners, and an in-house
babysitting annex, the Little Wing, where mem-
bers’ children may be looked after. The vibe is a
fusion of sisterly inclusion and exclusive luxury:
Private memberships run up to $3,000 per year,
and the wait-list is 9,000 names long.
But the Wing’s real draw is the women who
gather within. Wing members — there are
now around 12,000 — call themselves ‘‘Wing
women’’ or ‘‘sistren’’ or ‘‘Winglets.’’ Among them
are actress and model Hari Nef; the Women’s
March co-founder Linda Sarsour; social media
infl uencers; C.E.O.s; best-selling authors. (Multi-
ple employees of The New York Times, including
of this magazine, are Wing members.) When Gel-
man sent an email inviting an intimate crew of
women to join the Wing as ‘‘founding members’’
in summer 2016, she announced a new echelon
of New York elite. The club’s grand opening was
styled as a slumber party, where women who
made the cut wore luxe white pajamas, sampled
face masks and staged a pillow fi ght. Gelman is
the Wing’s chief executive but also the avatar of
its ideal member: a meticulously fashionable,
intensely driven woman who has managed to
make her mark in the world in a way that strives
to uplift other women at the same time.
The Wing has labeled itself a coven, not a soror-
ity, and Winglets have found at the Wing business
associates, friends, even wives: Two members
who met at the Flatiron location later became
engaged on its roof. Women have written books
and launched companies at the Wing. The club’s
sorbet-tinged interiors have become a coveted
backdrop for female-focused public-relations
eff orts: The Wing is where Hillary Clinton was
greeted like the victor in her post-campaign press
tour, and where Jennifer Lopez dropped the news
of her new skin-care line.
In the three and a half years since the compa-
ny’s inception, Wing locations have multiplied
across New York and popped up in Boston, Chi-
cago, London, West Hollywood, San Francisco
and Georgetown. New clubs are set to open in
Toronto and Seattle this year; Vogue ran a fea-
ture on Gelman and Kassan scouting spaces in
Paris. The Wing’s ascent is fueled by more than
$100 million in funding from venture capitalists
and stakeholders including Mindy Kaling, Valerie
Jarrett and Megan Rapinoe.
The very fact of the Wing’s existence has beenheralded — by Teen Vogue, by Alexandria Oca-
sio-Cortez and especially by the Wing itself — as
a beacon, a pioneering capitalist model that could
help improve the station of women everywhere.
When Gelman appeared on the cover of Inc.’s
‘‘Female Founders 100’’ issue last year, she was the
fi rst visibly pregnant C.E.O. to front a businessmagazine. Last year, the company took out an
ad in The New York Times’s sports section advo-
cating for members of the U.S. women’s soccer
team, who had sued the sport’s governing body
claiming gender discrimination. Styled like a
suff ragist broadsheet, it read: ‘‘Equal pay isn’t a
game.’’ In 2018, the Wing introduced a scholar-
ship program that extended free memberships to
people working for the ‘‘advancement of women
and girls,’’ gave health benefi ts to the clubs’ hourly
workers and promised ‘‘long-term, well-paying
job opportunities’’ within the organization. Forty
percent of its executives are now women of color.
As Gelman told Fast Company, ‘‘We want our mis-
sion to not only be expressed through our brand
but through our internal policies.’’
The promise of a feminist workplace has drawn
hundreds of bright and ambitious women to seek
employment at the Wing, eager to work in beauti-
ful spaces and in the company of women. ‘‘It was a
pink penthouse in the sky,’’ says Raichelle Carter,
a chef who worked in the Flatiron outpost of the
Perch last year, recalling her fi rst impression of the
place. ‘‘Butterfl ies, rainbows, everybody working
in unison.’’ Only later did she and many of her
colleagues come to think that the Wing’s utopia
was built to empower a very particular kind of
woman; that it was in fact their job to construct
the shimmering mirage of feminism for such
women; and that it was routine for women like
them to be undermined in the company’s pursuit
of feminist P.R. It was ‘‘a total facade,’’ Carter says.
‘‘It’s just like any other company that wants to
make their money.’’Luxury and feminism have long been inter-
twined. Virginia Woolf’s 1929 book ‘‘A Room of
One’s Own’’ — a Wing philosophical touchstone
— didn’t argue for just any old room. Woolf wanted
women to have access to ‘‘deep armchairs,’’ ‘‘pleas-
ant carpets’’ and opulently catered luncheons
presented by servants on silver trays, to bask in
the ‘‘urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are
the off spring of luxury and privacy and space.’’
She imbued amenities with the capacity to ease
sexist aff ronts. With the spoils of wealth on her
side, she wrote, ‘‘I need not hate any man; he can-
not hurt me.’’ Generations later, the second-wave
feminist Ellen Willis came at the argument from a
new perspective, mounting a practical defense of
female materialism. ‘‘The profusion of commodi-
ties is a genuine and powerful compensation for
oppression,’’ Willis wrote. ‘‘It is a bribe, but like all
bribes it off ers concrete benefi ts.’’ She added, ‘‘For
women, buying and wearing clothes and beauty
aids is not so much consumption as work.’’
If in the 1960s a segment of the feminist move-
ment was concerned with advancing women in
the work force, that impulse has now been so
thoroughly individualized that a woman’s career
can be cast as a kind of feminist statement in and
of itself. In this mode, consumer luxuries take24 3.22.20
The Wing
‘makes feminism a
cool club that you
can join as opposed to
a social necessity,’
one former
employee says.