The Wing Was A Women's Utopia ... Unless You Worked There

Employees of the women-only club have a story to tell about the company that sold the world Instagram-ready feminism

The idea was born in a Starbucks bathroom. Audrey Gelman, then a 28-year-old PR savant and New York personality, was tired of dashing between meetings in New York and Washington, charging her phone in hotel lobbies and freshening up in public toilets. She envisioned a kind of feminine pit stop she would call Refresh – a club where women could blow out their hair and check their email in comfort and peace.

But in time, Gelman’s aspirations widened. She realised that carving out a space for women was a “subtly radical” idea. Gelman partnered with Lauren Kassan, a 28-year-old director of business development at the fitness start-up ClassPass. They began plotting the club’s first location: a bright penthouse in New York’s Flatiron district along a historic stretch known as the Ladies’ Mile where, in the late 19th 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 efforts 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 final form, Gelman said on the Recode podcast last year, the Wing is intended as a “women’s utopia”.