Private Membership Clubs Are Redefining Exclusivity in a Second Gilded Age

Zero Bond isn’t the kind of place you stumble into. It’s the kind of place you already know about. There’s no sign out front, no way to know what’s beyond the heavy black doors unless your name is on the list.

It’s the kind of place where, on a cold December night, Taylor Swift slips past security with Blake Lively, Zoë Kravitz, and Jack Antonoff, the entire party vanishing into candlelit booths before the outside world even realizes they were there.

Across New York, private clubs like Zero Bond, Aman Club, ZZ’s, and The Twenty Two are thriving, with membership fees climbing into the six figures and waitlists stretching for months. At Aman, the price of admission is a staggering $200,000 initiation fee. At Casa Cipriani, a strict vetting process keeps out even the wealthy if they aren’t the right kind of wealthy. These clubs aren’t just businesses; they are status symbols — designed not just to provide luxury, but to curate access.

“When the economy is down, people with wealth are a little bit more uncomfortable walking around into random places,” said Conrad Frederick Gomez, a longtime member at Zero Bond. “So they prefer to have private environments.”

And business is booming.

Zero Bond has a 16,000-person waitlist — longer than the 10,000 that’s speculated publicly, according to Gomez. Aman Club charges a $200,000 initiation fee, plus $15,000 annually. Soho House, once the crown jewel of the modern private club movement, now boasts 267,494 members worldwide, with a record-high waitlist of 111,000, per its latest company reports.

The global private social club market is projected to reach $25.8 billion by 2027, growing at an annual rate of 11.2%, according to Mordor Intelligence.

The demand is clear. But exclusivity only works when it feels rare.

“If the club maximizes profits, you want to have as many members as possible. But then if it gets too crowded, it loses its exclusivity,” said Joseph Foudy, an economics professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. “It’s the same issue as a Birkin bag.”

Setha Low, an anthropologist at CUNY’s Graduate Center, sees a broader shift in how people define belongings — a growing separation between social classes.

“I see it as part of the broader pattern of social fragmentation,” Low says, “and particularly the rise of wanting to be with ‘people like us’.”

Zero Bond, The Core Club and New York Classic Car Club

If you ask Conrad Gomez why he belongs to three private clubs, he won’t talk about the cocktails or the interiors, though they are, of course, impeccable. He won’t mention the low hum of conversation, the smell of polished leather and aged whiskey, the celebrities and business moguls, or the way the city outside seems to dissolve when he steps through the door.

Instead, he’ll tell you it’s an investment.

“The investment made more than enough, more than the money that it costs to join them,” he says simply, citing the kind of people he encounters at The Core Club, like former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a frequent visitor.

His other memberships? Zero Bond, a high-profile social club admitting only 200-300 people per year, and New York Classic Car Club, catering to those who prefer their networking over the rumble of vintage engines.

Gomez works for a family office, where access isn’t just about socializing — it’s about deals. “It’s totally like you get your ROI within a couple months,” he says. “Whatever you spend to join, you’ll make it back.

His reasoning is simple: these clubs eliminate the friction in high-stakes networking. The people he meets could be future business partners.

“We invest in SPVs,” he explains, referring to special purpose vehicles (SPVs) used in private equity and venture capital. “A lot of SPVs charge fees. I became good enough friends with them, they wrote off the fees (for me).”

But the business of exclusivity has its own contradictions. Zero Bond actually “makes it worse”, “it's actually not that expensive compared to other places. It's just impossible to get into it.” Foudy said.

That’s not bad news for business. “Who said they (Zero Bond) don’t make money,” Gomez said, “They are busy, it’s always packed. People spend a few hundred dollars there.”

It’s a theory playing out in real-time. As layoffs hit tech and venture capital pulls back, private clubs are experiencing a surge in applications.

“When there’s a massive wealth gap, we are gonna have more private clubs – and more expensive (ones), ” Gomez says. “We might even be entering a new gilded age.”

Who’s joining now? Or leaving (to be accurate)?

For Dan Kim, a creative director at McCann, knowing where to be — and when — is second nature. His taste is honed from years of traveling for ad shoots and moving between New York’s hottest restaurants, bars, and private spaces before the crowds catch on.

So when he first joined Dumbo House, an outpost of Soho House in Brooklyn, it felt like a secret well-kept.

“There was the whole wow factor, the views,” he said, remembering the place as understated, creative, and just off the radar.

That, like all good secrets, didn’t last.

One of his favorite discoveries last year was Berenjak, an Italian pop-up inside Dumbo House. When he first dined there, it was empty.

“I remember thinking, it was kind of nice. No one is here yet.”

Then, the reservation system caught up. Soon, it was impossible to book — even for him.

“I tried to go back, and they turned me away. As a member,” he said. “Because I didn’t book through their system.”

Soho House, once an exclusive haven for creative professionals, has relaxed its stance. Membership has expanded, and what was once a carefully curated enclave now accepts a broader range of applicants — as long as they can afford it.

But exclusivity at Soho House has always been fluid. After purging finance professionals in 2010 to maintain its “creative” image, the club faced another reckoning in the wake of Sylvie Cachay’s murder that same year. Cachay, a swimsuit designer, was found dead in a bathtub at Soho House New York, and while her boyfriend was later convicted, the incident rattled the club’s reputation. In the aftermath, the brand pivoted again, quietly shifting away from its original artistic ethos.

“It used to be chill, like you’d find a quiet corner, have a drink, run into someone interesting,” Kim said. “Now, there’s always a DJ. It’s always loud. It’s not the same.”

He hasn’t canceled, not because he’s using the club all the time, but he admits he’s thinking about it.

Foudy explains the emerging divide.

“The mid-tier clubs will suffer,” he said. “The ultra-luxury ones, like Aman and Cipriani, will always do well because there’s always a sliver of people who won’t bat an eye at dropping hundreds of thousands.”

The ones who walked away

For Roger Vincent, clubs are more about practicality nowadays.

As CIO and founder of Summation Capital, and a former Investment Officer for Cornell University’s Endowment, Vincent had been a member of Soho House in the early 2000s, back when it was just getting started.

“It was a lot of fun,” he recalled. “And it was great to have an outdoor swimming pool in Manhattan. It felt like part of that wave of new, young clubs that were coming in and disrupting the old ones.”

But then, things changed.

“They actually didn’t renew my membership,” he said.

Soho House had initially welcomed finance professionals, but by 2010, they began purging them to cultivate a more creative image.

Vincent didn’t fight it. Instead, he moved on. He switched to the University Club when he worked in midtown. When he took a role at Cornell University Endowment, he joined the Cornell Club. Now he’s a member at The Yale Club, because of his alumni status at Dartmouth College.

Unlike Gomez, who sees clubs as networking investments, Vincent is skeptical.

“I don’t think that many people are making exclusive relationships there,” he said. “It’s not some secret place where all the good business is happening. It’s just a meeting place.”

Foudy agrees. “The idea that these clubs are crucial for business networking is probably less true now. It’s more about social validation.”

Vincent believes the university clubs can serve a different function. And… “I’m just not interested in collecting clubs,” Vincent said. “I could afford it, but I’d rather spend my money on other things.”

Old and new players

The old school clubs are struggling.

The Princeton Club of New York is gone, unable to survive the financial strain of the pandemic. 

“The old school clubs are non-profit anyway,” Foudy said, “but most of the university clubs do poorly, because people don't socialize that way. It seems stuffy. It seems elitist.”

On the other hand…

Aman charges six figures to join. The Core Club draws top investors. Zero Bond still has a waitlist tens of thousands deep.

“People are moving to a model where professional success, social media, profile, matter more to membership, like at Zero Bond,” Foudy said.

Setha Low sees it as part of the broader pattern of social fragmentation. She said, “Private clubs can be a positive ‘third space’ that fosters community and trust. But at a societal level, the results are not so positive.”

Even money isn’t a guarantee for entry. “My guess is there are rich people that have not been allowed into Zero Bond,” Foudy said.

And tradition? That barely matters anymore.

“Going to Zero Bond and saying, ‘I went to Harvard. My father went to Harvard. My father’s father went to Harvard’ — that’s a joy kill.”