![]() ![]() Her velvet tiara featured a peacock, and a string of pearls that had belonged to Catherine the Great stretched across her waist. Per Anderson Cooper’s new book Vanderbilt, she wore a yellow-and-white brocade gown, an underskirt in deep orange and pale butter, and an overskirt and bodice hand-worked in blue satin and decorated with gold beading. Mrs Astor dressed as a Venetian princess, so Alva dressed as a yet more lavish Venetian princess. She changed the rules there and her great quantity of money harnessed that power of the press.” “The old way of thinking was not relevant any more. “The costume ball where you had not only the glitziness of that period as a baseline, even further by making it into a masked ball, so you could add more embellishments and more cost – with the idea that you wanted to show off among your peers, but also to the public – feeds into her power directly,” says Fine Collins. She would have been incredibly successful on Instagram. Alva and guests posed alone in their couture against opulent backdrops (Alva with live doves), for photographs the press could hardly resist. The ball itself was a mega media opportunity. She invited 1,200 guests to her palatial house on 660 Fifth Avenue, known as the Petit Château, but excluded Mrs Astor, who was forced to call on Alva to earn good enough favour for an invitation it was a clear admission of defeat, which society writers of the time relished. She created “moments”, the most famous of which was her masked ball of 1883. FASHINABLE MALE SOCIALITE HOW TOPer Fine Collins, while the older guard had a “waspy fear of stylishness, the Vanderbilts would never not want to be seen in the most recent, most flashy clothing”.Īlva, in particular, knew how to feed the public interest – the hype. A sea-blue satin evening dress with a long ostrich feather-trimmed train and a rich pink velvet gown with sables were both fitted for her by Jean Worth, son of Charles. Inside, the array of lovely dresses, expensive furs and diaphanous lingerie fairly took one’s breath away,” she said. “The Rue de la Paix was the fashionable shopping centre and names of the great dressmakers – Worth, Doucet, Rouff – were printed on small doors admitting one to modest shops. In her memoir The Glitter and the Gold (1952), Alva’s daughter Consuelo writes of spring visits to Paris on her family’s new steamboat. They were charged more, just on the assumption that they were the rich ones.”īut this is how the Vanderbilts splurged, led ferociously by Alva. A Worth dress was the most costly garment of its day.” Fine Collins adds that Americans had to pay an outsider tax: “There was not much respect for American clients at the time. “He never did house calls, not even for royalty, so clients, if they were accepted by Worth, had to travel to Paris for their fittings. “A Worth dress was a significant status symbol,” curator Phyllis Magidson told New York Magazine in 2013. Worth outfitted Napoleon III, and Empress Eugénie was a patron: royal links that made him an idol in America. ![]() “To ascend socially, you had to align yourself with the European idea of aristocracy, which reflected the kind of art you collected and clothing made in Paris.”Ĭharles Frederick Worth (1825-1895), the English-born Paris-based designer known as the father of couture, was the motivation behind many steamboat journeys to French shores. “Families had steam yachts for shopping expeditions clothing and husbands,” says Fine Collins. Access to and idolisation of Europe, its royals and aristocrats, distinguished high-fliers from has-beens. ![]() “With each succeeding group, there was more and more interest in clothing and displays of wealth,” says Fine Collins. Where the earlier groups prided themselves on having little or no interest in clothing – considered vanity – the newest socialites went to the ends of the earth to appear richer than rich. If you found the data or information on this page useful in your research, please use the tool below to properly cite or reference Word Squared as the source.The divides between these competing groups revealed themselves through fashion (and don’t they still?). We spend a lot of time collecting, cleaning, merging, and formatting the data that is shown on the site to be as useful to you as possible. Hopefully this tool has helped you to find the correct answer to your Trendsetting socialite crossword clue.ĭon't forget to come back next time you need help to find more answers to your crossword problems. ![]()
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