The promise of a feminist workplace has drawn hundreds of bright and ambitious women to seek employment at the Wing, eager to work in beautiful 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 first impression of the place. “Butterflies, 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 intertwined. 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,” “pleasant carpets” and opulently catered luncheons presented by servants on silver trays, to bask in the “urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and privacy and space.” She imbued amenities with the capacity to ease sexist affronts. With the spoils of wealth on her side, she wrote, “I need not hate any man; he cannot 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 commodi­ties is a genuine and powerful compensation for oppression,” Willis wrote. “It is a bribe, but like all bribes it offers concrete benefits.” 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 movement 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 take on a feminist valence too, signifying power and the mechanism for accruing more. The Wing’s merchandise — key chains that read “girls doing whatever the [expletive] they want,” tote bags that say “TAKING UP SPACE,” socks that read “PAY ME” — invite members and nonmembers alike to telegraph that feminized mode of ambition, coyly aestheticizing the kind of entitlement that comes so easily to many men.

At the very least, the stuff makes you feel good. The Perch’s “Virgin Woolf” mocktail is refreshing; the water pressure from the Wing shower head is reassuringly firm. At the Wing, comfort itself can represent a kind of progress. As Gelman once put it on Instagram: “Women go through their lives taking care of everyone & everything, and there is deep relief in entering any tangible space where someone is finally taking care of you.”

The union between feminism and marketing is the consummation of a long relationship. In the 1970s, Ms. Magazine influenced corporations to scrap their sexist ads in favor of feminist-themed pitches, but today it is the branders themselves who are hailed as feminist icons. In Gelman, feminism has one of New York’s most charming and relentless flacks on its side. When the socialist It Girls of the “Red Scare” podcast ribbed the Wing for its bourgeois sensibility, Gelman worked to change their minds, making herself a T-shirt that said “Frenemy of the Pod,” showing up at a live taping and posing next to one of the hosts making the universal sign for cunnilingus. Gelman is not just the face of her own company but also a kind of executive influencer whose currency as a female C.E.O. is used to brush other products with a touch of feminism. In 2017 she appeared in a spot for Chanel fine jewelry in which she flexes her arms and advises, “Be empowered”; last year she starred in an ad for Air France in which she reclines in a roomy business-class seat. “I’m a C.E.O.,” she informs the “guys” who dominate the class. “Hey, I belong here, too.”

Though the Wing’s motto is “empowering women through community,” it also builds marketing relationships, plugging companies like American Express, Land Rover and Amazon Prime into its ready-made feminist branding apparatus. These companies are eager to seed the Wing with their swag and minister to well-connected members at sponsored events, images of which percolate across Instagram like modern infomercials. The place is an influence machine: Wing members effectively pay to advertise products to other women in front of the club’s feminine backdrops, and along the way, burnish their own brand power too.