The Season: A Social History of the Debutante
The first modern models appeared in the Paris salon of English courtier Charles Frederic Worth in the late 1850s, when the famous dressmaker pulled young women from his workshop floor to be mannequins for his wealthy clientele.
Ashley Mears • Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit
Today, material goods are plentiful but their ability to reveal or enable social mobility is increasingly limited. There is no longer a dominant leisure class; in its place the aspirational class is rewriting the patterns of consumption while simultaneously disengaging in conventional material conspicuous consumption.
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett • The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class
Neither of them became part of the chic young divorcée industrial complex, but they passed the urge down and let it multiply instead. Perhaps if I ever have a daughter, she’ll come of age in the era of the chic young annulment.
Another innovation was the creation of parks with large, tree-lined carriageways where the wealthy could parade around and show off to each other in their fancy vehicles. Marie de Médicis, the queen of Henri IV, introduced this idea to Paris in 1616. The Cours-la-Reine, next to the Seine River, was modeled on the roadway, known as the Corso, next t
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