FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Travel

How to Look Like an Asshole at a Party

It's our ten least favorite party photo pose cliches!

I don't know if you've noticed, but here at VICE, we go to a LOT of parties. We conduct all our job interviews either in Berlin dark rooms, at dawn in poorly attended house parties in Bushwick, or through glory holes. Here are a few things we've noticed about how people behave when a camera wants to immortalize them in the party moment.

It's our ten least favorite party photo pose cliches!

THE PARTY BURQA

Advertisement

The vibe you hope to give off: You're coy! You're an enigma! You're the belle of Baz Luhrmann's Capulet Ball! Your eyes are lakes that can only be swum in by other fallen angels, and those lakes are as endlessly deep as… (etc.)

The vibe you're actually giving off: You have a photic sneeze reflex and the flash just made you atchoo all the blow out of your nose. THE BADASS

The vibe you hope to give off: You're James Dean, if he were in the Sex Pistols (but with way more edge).

The vibe you're actually giving off: You're my grandma, if her charades word was "teenager."

THE DEUCE THROWER

The vibe you hope to give off: TBH, I don't really know what this hand sign means. I guess some kind of allusion to street credibility, and danger? So you're basically someone who tends to walk down streets that are dangerous. Good for you.

The vibe you're actually giving off: You're Ke$ha, MySpace.com, and "99 Problems (Clean Version)." (PS, if any of you guys are actually in a gang or something, please don't "merk" me.) THE FAKE LESBIAN

The vibe you hope to give off: You're a beautiful, confident, Warholian freak, who's perfectly comfortable with her sexuality. So much so, in fact, that you'll kiss any gender, and you don't give a fuck who's around to see (AND PHOTOGRAPH!) it.

The vibe you're actually giving off: The overwhelming vibes of sadness that come from someone doing something sexual that they're not into. The same vibes that make it impossible for me to watch most girl-on-girl porn, or that make child abuse such a bummer.

Advertisement

THE BRAD PITT FINGER

The vibe you hope to give off: Uh oh—some intrusive berk with a camera has been caught in the act! But really, who gives a shit? You've been photographed so many times that at this point your personal space is basically Poland. Your personal space is an office that party photographers go to work in every single day. Other people's babies have been conceived in it. You're a social multiverse and the rest of us are just space waste trapped in a sad and lonely orbit around you.

The vibe you're actually giving off: Brad Pitt vibes. (i.e. really, really, really, douchey ones. With highlights.) THE MAGNETIC HEAD

The vibe you hope to give off: You are a confident, outgoing person who is totally, 100 percent comfortable with intimate human contact in public. Everyone in the place would take a bullet for you, as would you for them. You're as thick as bloody thieves!

The vibe you're actually giving off: Someone who doesn't know how a camera works. The photographer is like, eight feet away from you: you don't need to lean in that close. So I'm not sure what kind of vibes they are… A baby's? A Tudor time-traveller's? IDK, just someone who doesn't understand the modern world at all.

THE DISDAINFUL HIPSTER

The vibe you hope to give off: You're so high up the scene hierarchy, you literally can't contain your "You wanna take my picture? Eugh, fine" feelings when someone points a camera at you. The event is below you. Everyone else here is below you. Fun is below you.

Advertisement

The vibe you're actually giving off: GAHAHAHA! Why so serious, Mr. Gwumpy Pants? Everyone else here's having a great time (because they're laughing at your "pain").

THE SHIRTLESS MALE

The vibe you hope to give off: You're fraternal. Manly. Unafraid. Wild. Sexy…

The vibe you're actually giving off: Da-da-da-da-da-da-DA-DA-DA-DA-da-da-da (that was a phonetic transcription of "Chelsea Dagger" by The Fratellis, BTW). THE BOOB FLASH

The vibe you hope to give off: You're Andy Warhol again, but this time if he were a woman who looked like Paz de la Huerta, on ecstasy, at a rave to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The vibe you're actually giving off: Emotional problems/daddy issues.

END OF NIGHT FOREVER ALONE SADFACE

The vibe you want to give off: You know what? Morrissey was right: fuck people, I'm better off alone. Genius thrives only in isolation.

The vibe you're actually giving off: You checked the smoking area, the bathroom line, and all the little side-rooms, and the girl you spent the night eyeballing has already left. A total of four women remain, but they're surrounded by a baying pack of men, who, even in their paralytic state, possess better looks and more charm than you could ever muster sober. You scan the room for house party potential but all your friends have left and none of them are answering their phones. "Here we are again, old friend," you sigh, staring down at your cocaine-clogged penis and mentally preparing yourself for the horrifying porn you're gonna have to watch for the next three hours if you ever want to lull your lonely body into sleep again.

Follow Jamie on Twitter: @JLCT

Wondering how to look great at a party? Lookee here:

We Went to a Foam Party in Magaluf

A Beginners' Guide to Drugs for Girls