Consider the word “hype”, as it is used today. When Kim Kardashian entered the 2021 Met Gala, covered head-to-toe in black Balenciaga, there was a social media storm. The look, which was inspired by the all-American T-shirt, spawned a thousand memes and Tweets. Headlines instantly followed: Kim Kardashian leads the return of fetish face-wear; Kim Kardashian responds to criticism of her Met Gala look; Here’s Why Kim Kardashian Reportedly Covered Her Face At The Met Gala 2021.
Every detail, from the imperceptible make-up behind her face covering to the fact that Kanye West had a hand in its design, was mined to the last. But while Kardashian is the subject of so much hype, she has agency. The stunt simultaneously proliferated her image and boosted the brand of Balenciaga: a commercial win-win. In the months since, she has worn at least a dozen obviously similar catsuits from the same designer: pink velvet to present Saturday Night Live; spandex and feathers to leave the studio; black spandex to nip to CVS; blue spandex to celebrate passing her Baby Bar exam… Each of these is chronicled on her Instagram account, where the masses gather to fawn.
Hers is an ultra-contemporary image, but Kardashian is following a path laid out by her American forbears: the society queens of the Gilded Age, who mastered the media. It is the subject of Julian Fellowes’s new drama The Gilded Age, now available on Sky Atlantic and Now in the UK, and HBO.
New York in the late 1800s was a social climber’s battlefield. No expense was too extravagant if it boosted a socialite’s stature – and none was more notorious than Alva Vanderbilt (1853-1933), née Smith, who married into America’s richest dynasty. Once wed to William K Vanderbilt, Alva became the granddaughter-in-law of Cornelius “The Commodore” Vanderbilt (1794-1877), the titan who had turned a $100 loan into a $100 million railroad and shipping fortune in the mid-1800s. “It would have been the equivalent of Google and tech today. The sheer vastness of the money was far more than in the preceding generation,” says Amy Fine Collins, the lauded journalist and fashion and art historian.
The family became wealthier than the US treasury, but earning the respect of society was a different game. While their money was newly made, the Astors’ had been cemented a few decades earlier, owing to success in the fur industry. The Mrs Astor, as Caroline Schermerhorn Astor (1830-1908) was known, saw the Vanderbilts as flash and vulgar, and abstained from inviting Alva to her annual society ball. Thus, Alva’s mission became making Mrs Astor crack, at the expense of all else. She spent like there was no tomorrow, throwing $6 million balls in lavish Vanderbilt palaces, cloaked in gilt gowns and cinched by corsetry.
As America’s middle class exploded and industrialisation enabled some families of average means to make previously unheard of fortunes, the tension between Old Money and New Money groups intensified. Fine Collins says this was the beginning of a cycle which was and is still continually evolving: “It’s an odd phenomenon in America because it doesn’t really fit into any model that existed in the old world, the idea of social classes and how the hierarchies shifted around. You have an early group who were considered upper class: the original Dutch families, some of the Anglo-American families that arrived in the 17th century, and the Quakers. They looked down on the Robber Baron class, like the Vanderbilts.”
The divides between these competing groups revealed themselves through fashion (and don’t they still?). 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. “With each succeeding group, there was more and more interest in clothing and displays of wealth,” says Fine Collins. Access to and idolisation of Europe, its royals and aristocrats, distinguished high-fliers from has-beens. “Families had steam yachts for shopping expeditions [to acquire] clothing and husbands,” says Fine Collins. “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.”
Charles 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. Worth outfitted Napoleon III, and Empress Eugénie was a patron: royal links that made him an idol in America. “A Worth dress was a significant status symbol,” curator Phyllis Magidson told New York Magazinein 2013. “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 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. They were charged more, just on the assumption that they were the rich ones.”
But this is how the Vanderbilts splurged, led ferociously by Alva. 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. “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. Inside, the array of lovely dresses, expensive furs and diaphanous lingerie fairly took one’s breath away,” she said. 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. Per 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”.
The gowns were a vehicle. They demanded attention that ultimately made sure their wearers could not be ignored. “One of the tools that [Alva] used to facilitate her ascension was the press,” says Fine Collins. “That, again, was something new, which the older money in America would have considered vulgar. It didn’t matter, because this was a time when the press began to assume so much power, and there were visuals accompanying the social columns. The public was clamouring to know more about the titans of industry and their wives’ activities. It was like watching movie stars.”
The party made the front page of the New York Times the following morning: “The Vanderbilt ball has agitated New York society more than any event that has occurred here in many years. It has disturbed the sleep and occupied the waking hours of social butterflies, both male and female, for over six weeks… The ladies have been driven to the verge of distraction in the effort to settle the comparative advantages of ancient, mediaeval and modern costumes.” As Cooper writes in Vanderbilt, “The press tripped all over itself with superlatives in describing the evening, drawing comparisons to ‘the Orient’, the courts of Europe, the ancient world – in all instances, using references that underscored the otherness, the inaccessibility of that degree of privilege and sumptuousness. Suggesting that one woman’s costume party could be compared to the opulence of ancient Rome presented Gilded Age society as the natural successor to these great things.”
Its legend has endured. In his 1995 essay for Vanity Fair, Dominick Dunne wrote of the event: “Alva’s blindingly splendid costume ball in 1883 was an occasion of spectacular extravagance such as had never been seen before in this country and has rarely been equalled since. None of the big spenders of the 1980s had anything on the Vanderbilts when it came to showing off their money.”
Decades later, event photography, as pioneered here, inspired American fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert to create the International Best Dressed List in 1940. “It was a genius idea, understanding the competitive nature of getting dressed,” says Fine Collins. “If you are the favoured client of the designer, you get first access. There was such social cachet attached to being elected to this directory that it had even more worth than the Social Register. It was like a passport through clothes.”
So, can we draw comparisons between social queens of the Gilded Age and their contemporary counterparts? “It’s difficult not to. We always want to use these contemporary analogies to make us understand something historically. But [the Kim Kardashian comparison] is not a mistake, because here we are talking about the power of publicity and its domination through manipulating the public interest and constantly feeding this hunger for more images, more thrills and frissons about extravagance and the fantasy of having all these clothes and all this attention,” says Fine Collins.
“With the big difference that, in the case of that group of the Gilded Age, part of their aspiration had to do with being somewhat cultured in old-world history and style and taste, which does not apply to the Kardashians right now. The consumption, yes. The visibility, yes.”
The Gilded Age was the beginning of the brand partnership: the mutual commercial relationship between designer and muse that reigns over fashion and celebrity today, where the brightest young thing is snapped up and hyped up (today Emma Raducanu by Dior and Princess Olympia of Greece by Louis Vuitton; once Inès de la Fressange by Chanel and Audrey Hepburn by Hubert de Givenchy). “It pioneered the idea of advertisement through visibility. The women were billboards: they created desire,” adds Fine Collins. Bold images, painstakingly crafted poses and one-of-a-kind looks? A public lust for glamour? It sounds very now.
