Plage de Pampelonne, high season, 2025. The offshore horizon is saturated with super yachts - vast, floating monuments to economic visibility. Many of them are rented not owned - for the purpose of being seen, photographed, as a status content. On land, the beach is segmented: fenced pathways, overlapping brand zones, and intermittent infrastructure that offers little continuity or spatial logic. The beach is not one open, flowing space. It is broken into parts - each with its own rules, access points, and aesthetic. The coastline doesn’t read as a unified public environment, but as a series of private stages, each optimized for display.

For several decades, the area remained relatively informal, low-build, and porous. The clubs were there, but they were spatially integrated into a wider landscape of open sand and shared use. Even as they multiplied over the years, they did not immediately partition the coastline in the way we see today. The sharp shift towards visible segmentation, fencing, branded enclosures, and hyper-commercial zoning accelerated in the 1990s-2000s, and especially in the last 10-15 years, driven by the rise of curated luxury marketing zones, influencer and content-driven tourism, and regulatory efforts by the government. The last one, paradoxically created to protect the coastline and limit permanent construction, lead to intensified competition among operators - leading to shorter cycles, higher branding pressure, and increasingly curated leisure formats. The clubs compete. Each club projects its identity through color schemes, signage, and above all sound. Music plays at high volume throughout the day - mainstream, algorithmic, and loud. The result is an atmosphere of overexposure without dept. The landscape is saturated with visual and auditory cues, but emptied of intimacy, sophistication, and subtlety.

So the clubs compete, so the people perform. It reflects a widespread confusion between symbols of status and the structure of value. Pampelonne today functions less as a beach than as a visual arena - a curated platform for demonstrating aspirational belonging. Underneath this performance lies a deeper instability. Many of those participating in it do not seek pleasure; they seek confirmation. The relationship in luxury here is not grounded in taste or experience, but in competition - a value system internalized from early life and amplified by a culture of constant comparison. What emerges is not elite behavior they seek for, but middle-class mimicry with amplified tools: yachts, fancy cars, tables in the club.

But why does it work like this? Why do so many people end up staging versions of themselves beside rented yachts, under branded unbrellas? Why does a space filled with wealth, design, and attention feel emotionally thin? What is happening in a society where the absence of visible status begins to resemble the absence of identity itself? The answer lies certainly not in luxury, but in what is projected onto it. When self-worth is shaped by competition and external validation, symbolic environments like Pampelonne become mirrors of insecurity. Signals multiply. Distinction becomes performance. And the cycle continues - aspiration, display, exhaustion.

Plage de Pampelonne was part of quiet agricultural landscape (© Edie Lou)

The History of Pampelonne

Before its transformation into a seasonal luxury stage, Plage de Pampelonne was part of a quiet agricultural landscape. The surrounding terrain was shaped by pine forests, vineyards, and sandy footpaths that connected rural inland areas to the sea. The beach was used by locals, fishermen, and the occasional traveler - embedded in the rhythms of a region that had yet to enter the orbit of global leisure culture. Plage Pampelonne was a quiet, undeveloped stretch of Mediterranean coastline, located just south of Saint-Tropez, in the commune of Ramatuelle.

The recorded human presence in the Ramatuelle region stretches back thousands of years, though the beach itself wasn’t formally recognized or developed until much later. The area has been inhabited since prehistoric times, with evidence of Ligurian, Greek, and later Roman activity throughout the Saint-Tropez peninsula. Under the Romans, the region formed part of the Provincia Romana. Vine cultivation and fishing were practiced inland and along the coast. Pampelonne itself - flat, sandy, and somewhat exposed - was likely used for practical reasons: access to the sea, small-scale fishing, possibly salt harvesting, but it was not a port or settlement.

Through the 19th century, the Pampelonne plain was used agriculturally. The land was largely divided into vineyards, small farms, and pine forest. The coast remained undeveloped. Even Saint-Tropez, just a few miles away, remained a fishing village until the 1920s and only began to attract attention from Parisian artists and writers in the interwar years. In the 1920s, it had begun attracting a small, influential group of artists and writers. Neo-impressionist painter Paul Signac settled there in 1892, turning his studio - La Hune - into an informal salon for painters like Henri Matisse, Henri-Edmond Cross, Charles Camoin, and Van Rysselberghe. Their interest in the light and color of the region helped place Saint-Tropez on the artistic map. It drew writers like Colette, Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fly from the Bloomsbury Group - who came seeking a kind of solitude. They were early examples of cultural elites using the region for artistic retreat. These developments started shifting Saint-Tropez from a rural fishing port into an international cultural hub - anchoring Pampelonne’s later emergence as a stage for leisure and a kind of luxury.

It wasn’t until the decade following World War II that Pampelonne’s identity began to shift. In 1955, Bernard de Colmont, a local landowner, established a simple canteen on the beach to serve meals to the film crew of Et Dieu… crèa la femme (And God Created Woman), directed by Roger Vadim. The film, which starred Brigitte Bardot, became a cultural event. Bardot’s presence - both on-screen and off - contributed to the formation of a new aesthetic around the Saint-Tropez region: it defined a new era of sexual freedom, independent femininity, and Mediterranean allure. Bardot represented a kind of effortless sensuality: barefoot, sun-kissed, undone elegance - a departure from formal, aristocratic leisure. It made the Riviera feel youthful, liberated, wild. The image sold was one of freedom and authenticity. Brigitte Bardot’s image wasn’t confined just to the film. She spent time in Saint-Tropez in real life, bought a house there (La Madrague), and became personally tied to the location. Her celebrity gave the place symbolic weight.

Et Dieu…créa la femme (© of the original picture belongs to the rightful owner)

The Colmont Family and the Foundation of Club 55

To understand the evolution of Pampelonne’s club culture today - its branding and its contradictions - one must begin with Club 55. It was created by the Colmont family and ended up becoming the model for a kind of beach club culture - even though they probably didn’t mean for it to. Bernard de Colmont, an ethnologist and former naval officer, arrived in the late 1940s with his wife, Geneviève, and their children, seeking a life oriented around simplicity, nature, and quiet withdrawal. They built some wooden cabins on what was then a completely undeveloped stretch of beach - no electricity, no water, no infrastructure.

In the early 1950s, the site remained private and minimally structured - used seasonally by the family and occassionally shared with friends or acquaintances. There was no commercial activity. The setup consisted of sleeping cabins, an open-air kitchen, and a shaded dining area with simple wooden furniture. The familiy used the idyllic place without electricity or running water, relying on the sources nature gave them. The daily life was structured around the basic limitations of the site - simple materials, limited tools, and full exposure to seasonal conditions.

The huts, kitchen, and outdoor space remained as they were - until 1955, when the space intersected - temporarily - with the production of Et Dieu…crèa la femme. In the summer of 1955, the Colmonts were asked to accommodate the nearby film crew as there were no restaurants or facilities nearby. Without altering the domestic structure of the site, they agreed to host them using their existing kitchen and outdoor space. Geneviève prepared simple lunches, and tables were set up beneath the tamarisk trees, just as they had been for family and friends. The arrangement remained informal and limited in scope, but it marked the first time the space was activated beyond its private function - not yet a business, but no longer entirely private. Something in-between with aligning energy. It was a moment of overlap: a domestic setting temporarily intersecting with a cultural production.

In its atmosphere - unstructured, natural, and free of facade - the setting reflected a broader Zeitgeist: a postwar shift, a rejection of the authoritarian ideologies that had defined the previous decade, and a cultural turn toward authenticity, physical ease, and new ideals of personal freedom. Bardot, moved through the space with a kind of instinctive authority - barefoot, self-aware, and unbound by conventional codes of femininity. Resistant to traditional prescriptions - aligned with a cultural shift already underway. She embodied a new model of femininity, emerging in quiet defiance of the domesticated, state-defined woman of fascist ideal: autonomous, sensual, emotionally direct - authoring her own image. The resonance between figure, setting, and historical mood was precise. Neither the Colmonts, nor Bardot, nor the film crew could have fully recognized the cultural significance of that moment - but in retrospect, it marked a threshold. From that point forward, Pampelonne was no longer simply a beach.

The Rise of Beach Club Culture on Pampelonne

The film’s cultural impact, the embodiment of la femme libre, catapulted Brigitte Bardot to international fame. Her onscreen presence particularly her barefoot, sun-drenched sensuality, helped define a new erotic imaginary tied to the Mediterranean landscape. Though Saint-Tropez was already known among a small circle of artists and bohemians, the film gave it global visibility. The imagery of Bardot - tanned, legère, and unapologetically herself - linked the region to fantasies of freedom, sensuality, and natural luxury. The setting, especially Pampelonne Beach, became inseparable from this symbolic charge: it wasn’t just a location; it became the mise-en-scène of contemporary desire.

The film marked a rupture in dominant codes of femininity and leisure. Against the backdrop of fascist and post-fascist conservatism and the moral rigidity of the Fourth Republic, Bardot’s character represented a symbolic break from the moralized aesthetics of postwar conformity - tied to both midcentury consumer aesthetics and a subtle anti-bourgeois impulse. The aesthetic - informal elegance, unstructured leisure, barefoot glamour - would become foundational for the branding of Pampelonne and Club 55. It provided an early blueprint for what would later be called bohemian luxury for rustic chic. Just think about Chloé… So, the film reframed the landscape, invented a lifestyle, and offered the first cinematic rendering of the “free” European summer - all of which lent Club 55 an original story that was both perfectly aligned - place, time, mindset - and mythically loaded. The founding moment not only of Club 55, but of Pampelonne’s entire symbolic economy.

Due to growing interest from word of mouth - especially among artists, actors, and aristocrats - the Colmonts began offering meals during the summer season more consistently. The operation slowly took shape as a semi-public, seasonal restaurant, through it remained discreet and unadvertized. By the early 1960s, the place becomes known as Club 55 - a name coined affectionately by its returning clientele, referencing its spontaneous origin year. It is not a “grand opening”. It was not created as a brand - it was recognized as a place.

From Distinction to Display

By the 1960s and 70s, however, the discreet charm of Club 55 began to attract both imitation and divergence. Clubs like La Voile Rouge (founded in 1963) introduced an entirely different logic - one based on visibility, excess, and erotic display. Where Club 55 had offered a myth of simplicity, La Voile Rouge delivered curated spectacle: champagne rituals, topless sunbathing (well, nothing against this though), and a social stage. Other clubs followed, experimenting with themes, cuisine, and aesthetic codes - wellness zones to high-style restaurant lounges.

The coastline, once a continuous and largely natural expanse, was gradually overlaid with an artificial logic - a grid of branded concessions, each claiming not only a physical slice of stand but a manufactured identity designed to signal exclusivity. What had once been informal and perfectly aligned was now partitioned, aestheticized, and sold back to the public in the form of differentiated experience. Leisure became a performance: not simply where one went, but what choice implied about class, taste, and social belonging. In this context, the beach ceased to be a natural space; it became a commercialized stage, where the illusion of freedom masked the machinery of superficial distinctions.

This segmentation deepened in the 2000s and 2010s, shaped by social media, accelerated by a curious blend of environmental regulation and consumer psychology. In recent years, the number of beach clubs has already been reduced, and new regulations now require that 80% of Pampelonne remain public, with only 20% reserved for private establishments. The Beach Decree prohibited permanent structures, forced clubs to rebuild each season - paradoxically - a law designed to preserve the coastline’s natural integrity has helped generate a throwaway economy - one in which beach clubs are dismantled and rebuilt each season. The system tries to balance environmental protection with the economic and cultural pressure to maintain Pampelonne’s identity - but that balance is fragile, and often tilted toward spectacle.

What was meant to protect nature now fuels a cycle of seasonal excess, where environmental stewardship coexists with diesel generators and a rotating cast of yacht parking and offshore parties (which don’t fall under land-based restrictions). Beach clubs must meet increasingly strict environmental and aesthetic criteria to win or renew their concession under the 20% privatized coastal limit. Despite those regulations, clubs are under pressure to maximize visibility, profit, and symbolic power within their few months of operation. Every summer it returns as a high-intensity consumption zone, cloaked in the aesthetic of natural ease. At least it tries to.

Pampelonne today functions like a seasonal luxury festival. But unlike a festival, Pampelonne beach clubs are not framed as events - they are framed as places. They sell not just access, but a sense of being part of something established, storied, and socially encoded. That illusion is central to the pleasure of elite leisure. If the clubs were obviously impermanent, that illusion would crack. Guests would feel like they were participating in a pop-up simulation, not inhabiting a real social order. And in the symbolic economy of luxury, permanence (or the illusion it) is a key currency: it signals stability, heritage, belonging, and legitimacy. Luxury performs permanence - mass culture performs ephermerality- festivals, pop-ups, flash sales - because it thrives on novelty and spectacle.

The illusion of continuity is maintained through design, branding, and ritualized repetition, but the infrastructure itself is fleeting. What the guest experiences as permanence is, in fact, a seasonal simulation - a world built to vanish, yet forced to feel eternal. This contradiction is the central problem of Pampelonne today: it must appear timeless, natural, and rooted - while being, in reality, temporary, reconstructed each season under legal constraint. Pampelonne no longer offers simplicity, but spectacle; not permanence, but programmed novelty, it has been absorbed into the logic of mass consumption culture.

Although the regulation is a meaningful step toward reclaiming the beach’s original charm and natural openness, legal reform alone is not enough. Without demand, there is no market - which means the burden does not fall on institutions or clubs alone. What is needed now is a shift in collective consciousness: a willingness to move beyond performance and toward presence, beyond excess and toward care.

The Violence of Visibility

And this brings us to the next question: how can our society get there? How can it begin to shift toward a more grounded, mindful form of presence? As we observe our culture a deeper pattern emerges - not necessarily rooted in malice, but in the learned behaviours of aspiration: a system that teaches us to seek belonging, identity, and fulfillment through visible symbols of success. The most destabilizing force on Pampelonne is not the billionaire’s yacht - it is the collective fantasy of the yacht: the widespread belief, shaped by culture, that certain objects, brands, and gestures grant value. Across social classes, people have been taught to seek meaning, belonging, and identity through visible signs of status. This logic - one of symbolic distinction - lies at the heart of mass-market luxury culture, and few thinkers captured it more precisely than Pierre Bourdieu. Taste, he argued, is never neutral. It reflects class, position, and reinforces it. What we wear, where we go, how we relax - these are not simply choices; they are acts of classification, shaping not only how others see us, but how we see ourselves.

At Pampelonne, this dynamic is distilled into its most legible form. The objects vary - the Rolex, the Vuitton tote, the rented Porsche, the yacht day charter - but the underlying mechanism is the same: to be seen as having arrived. The middle-class mindset emerges from this cultural conditioning: a learned belief that self-worth must be earned through performance, comparison, and upward display. It is a psychology shaped by uncertainty, the lack of inherited ease - in Bourdieu’s term - that makes signs feel natural. So the way is compensation with effort - which paradoxically reveals the insecurity. This isn’t confined to the middle class by income, but to a mindset formed under its logic - what Bourdieu might describe as a habitus of anxiety. It is cultural orientation toward self-worth as something earned through external recognition. The result is a mimetic performance of status, often directed not at elites, but laterally: toward one’s peers, family members, neighbours, and digital followers. These sings don’t represent real comfort or belonging. They represent aspirational insecurity - a desire to be read as valuable, especially in spaces where value is always being measured.

But, this cycle is not just socially exhausting - it is ecologically devastating. The sea, once a space of immersion and escape, has become a decorative threshold. One yacht follows another, stretching across the horizon like a floating showroom. Their presence is systemic. The market responds efficiently to aspiration: demand creates supply, and supply creates spectacle. In economic terms, this is a saturation of positional goods - where value depends on being seen, and thus must escalate to remain legible. The natural world is reduced to backdrop. The body becomes a surface of class communication: sculpted, tanned, curated, and posed.

As Byung-Chul Han observes, the subject is no longer oppressed from above but compelled from within - a tireless entrepreneur of the self, optimizing every gesture. Han is responding to thinkers like Foucault, who showed how power in modern societies (especially in the 18th - 20th centuries) operated through external institutions: schools, prisons, military discipline, surveillance, uniforms. This was the disciplinary society - where power was visible, coercive, and repressive. But Han argues that this model no longer fully applies. In contemporary societies, power is no longer enforced through prohibition or punishment. Instead, it takes the form of internalized compulsion - where the subject believe they are free, but are in fact driven to self-optimise, self-display, and self-exploit under the illusion of choice.

This self-compulsion feels like freedom - but it is the most efficient form of control. Because when people exploit themselves voluntarily, there is no need for external force. Burnout, anxiety, depression, and exhaustion aren’t accidents - they are structural symptoms of a system where the line between being an object and self has disappeared. Han calls this the violence of positivity. Freedom becomes the new form of control. No one is forced to pose, rent a yacht, perform beauty, or signal class. But everyone is doing it, because the system doesn’t need to coerce - it operates through internalized demand. People are smiling, lounging, drinking, photographing - and performing the self at every moment. The long-term result is not joy, but depletion. Pampelonne is no longer a destination but a dystopian loop of aesthetic labor - beautiful in a way, extractive, and empty at its core.

80% of Pampelonne remains public - with yacht skyline (© Edie Lou)

After Pampelonne

If the postwar Pampelonne once represented a rare synthesis of freedom, sensuality, and authenticity - a space where status was temporarily suspended in favour of elemental experience - its present form offers a stark counter-image. The landscape at Pampelonne today is not merely crowded - it is over-signified. The skyline, once open and natural, is now punctuated by yachts stacked like luxury billboards. The beach clubs extend into one another - a territorial patchwork of branded fences, calibrated soundtracks, and symbolically coded interiors. What was once a zone of openness has become a zone of sorting: a system in which every object, every gesture, every choice participates in the production of social visibility.

The atmosphere is charged with comparison. The visual field is flooded with symbols of aspiration: designer clothing, luxury items, rented performance cars. Here, leisure does not offer respite; it demands proof. The beach becomes a showroom for the anxiety of wanting to belong. In this saturated environment, the dystopian mechanics of Han’s “entrepreneur of the self” emerge with clarity. No one is forced or pressured against one’s will - like in a dictatorship or top-down control system - instead, they are compelled internally, through social pressure, comparison, and competition. In this climate, demand creates saturation - not only in economic terms (one yacht after another), but in symbolic terms. The value of the view declines the more it is photographed. The illusion of freedom conceals the structure of mimicry. Identity becomes formatting. And the performance must be repeated endlessly. This is the burnout society: the infinite self-performance.

And who is there to blame? The billionaires, the middle class, or the government, the system? The issue here is no longer who to blame. What we witness is a broader cultural phenomenon: a mass-market value system driven by visibility, acceleration, and symbolic consumption. This isn’t just Pampelonne - it is a mirror on a global scale. And, of course, it is not only a cultural crisis, but an ecological one too, worldwide. Beneath the symbolic exhaustion lies a deeper cost: nature itself. This model sustains itself not on care, meaning or depth - but on visibility, disposability, and ecological disregard.

In this environment of spectacle and exhaustion the origin of Club 55 stands apart. It did not emerge from a strategy deck or marketing ambition. It was founded by a family who valued solitude and nature. What began as an improvized meal shared with film crew unfolded into a space of real connection - built on repetition, trust, and unspoken values - where time was slow, attention was personal, and nothing was optimized for visibility. It was simple. In this context, the brilliance of Club 55 becomes even clearer. Its strategy, if it can be even called that, was the refusal of strategy-as-performance. It did not advertise. It did not over-design. It did not try to attract everyone. As Seth Godin would frame it, it functioned on tribal logic: “people like us do things like this.” Club 55 did not need to signal luxury - it was understood through experience, repetition, and trust. Its exclusivity emerged not from price or spectacle, but from its unique history and its true identity. And that model cannot be replicated. Club 55 did not begin with status, but with sincerity. A family served meals to strangers. And in that simple act, something lasting took root. Over time, care became real connection, connection became memory, and memory became legacy.

And yet, beneath the spectacle, a quieter lesson remains. Identity cannot be purchased, performed, or borrowed - it must be formed. Not through accumulation, but through consciousness and authenticity. It is built slowly: through education, through mindfulness, through the nourishment of interior life. Through reflection and presence. Through genuine self-care and care about others. So we can generate a form of positive energy that is the opposite of Han’s burnout-inducing, exhausting “positivity”. It is not performative, but restorative. And it is precisely this kind of energy - calm, rooted, and connected - that both humans and the planet urgently need. And the good news: most of it is free. Time, love, awareness, gratitude - these are the raw materials of true abundance. The essence of real luxury. Just like Brigitte Bardot back then - what she embodied was glamour, but of a different kind: effortless, instinctive, and free. A presence that came from within. It is a kind of authenticity that grows slowly - through awareness, care, and the quiet courage to become who you really are, your true identity.

https://www.routledge.com/Distinction-A-Social-Critique-of-the-Judgement-of-Taste/Bourdieu/p/book/9780415567886?srsltid=AfmBOoolpeeJBP7IiN00Vm6ARajy9K-r0losRc4KiP4LlpIHvV7Fj3IM

https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/burnout-society

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37133029-psychopolitics#CommunityReviews

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3828382-tribes

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40549476-this-is-marketing

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26195600-practicing-utopia

https://www.club55.fr/restaurant-en

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106330.Bobos_in_Paradise

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmqv88jWhyE