Debutante Balls

There was a bit of a kerfuffle about balls earlier this year:

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-06-07/ellie-kemper-apologizes-for-participating-in-debutante-ball

They are common in Queensland, and not particularly associated with wealth. Here’s one for a small country town on the north coast https://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2015/06/09/4251670.htm

A bizarre consequence is that rugby league players taking part in the State of Origin series for the first time are called debutant(e)s – both spellings are common for men, though “debutante” is normal for women https://www.4bc.com.au/podcast/maroons-debutantes/

‘Las Madrinas Ball is a debutante ball held in Los Angeles, California by Las Madrinas (Spanish, the Godmothers), a nonprofit organization founded in 1933 to provide financial support to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and its medical research programs. The Las Madrinas Ball has been described as “the oldest and most prestigious” debutante ball in the Los Angeles area[1] and as “the most impressive debutante ball in Southern California”.[2] It is held in December each year and is the traditional starting event of the Los Angeles social season.

The sponsoring organization, Las Madrinas, was founded on October 11, 1933 with 65 founding members including descendants of Californio land-grant families and local wealthy families,[2] mostly from areas like Pasadena and Hancock Park.[3] The organization’s mission was to raise funds for what was then called the Convalescent Home of the Children’s Hospital by putting on an annual charity ball. Las Madrinas held its first charity ball two months later, on December 15, 1933, at the Biltmore Hotel. In 1939 the format was transformed into a debutante ball. The ball was suspended during World War II and resumed in 1945.[4] Historically the debutantes in the Las Madrinas Ball were required to come from families of “money and breeding and social position.”[1]

For the first 25 years press photography was banned; the ban was lifted in 1958 to permit Life Magazine to cover the event.[2]’

and what always ‘floored’ me – that the US West Coast actually could be the utmost silly ‘conservative-debutante-ball-country-club-blue-book-orange-county’ in the whole of my ‘homeland’.

AND did you guys know that in the list of all Debutante Balls in the US Louisiana has THE longest :

‘New Orleans
The Pickwick Club
The Twelfth Night Revelers (TNR)
Le Debut des Jeunes Filles de la Nouvelle Orleans
the Bachelors’ Club
the Debutante Club
the Mid-Winter Cotillion
the Original Illinois Club
the Young Men Illinois Club
Rex Mardi Gras ball
Krewe of Proteus
Knights of Momus
Mistick Krewe of Comus
Elves of Oberon
Krewe of Athenians
The Atlanteans[10]’

Being photographed for the frontispiece of Country Life magazine might have survived a little longer, but I think they don’t even do that any more.

(Now that I think about it, I am surprised that the Internet cosplayers haven’t made spoof Country Life covers featuring themselves. Cosplaying Kate Middleton is definitely a thing).

A long ago, I went to school with the guy who directed Metropolitan and he knew that stuff. Well enough to skewer it by simply portraying it. I can also say (from personal experience) that some form of debutante type parties exist all over the United States, generally not associated with great wealth, but for the college bound young women from the more affluent preparatory schools). My sense was that those things were more for the parents (particularly the mothers) and for the more ‘fringy’ families in the social cohort sponsoring them.

In the United States, the Deb business involved a form of status qualification and group identity that has been utterly displaced by university admissions sorting. Sitting in the comfort of a university setting it’s easy to mock. Right in their with subscriptions to the hunt, country club memberships and familial military affiliations. But, the presentation of Debutantes to Society on the arms of Gentlemen Escorts is just a different system from the one that has prevailed since WWII. Oh, yeah, and ‘coming out’ has acquired an entirely different meaning.

Candidly, I think we are at ‘peak uni’ right now, and the internal contradictions of the current rites of passage are being ruthlessly exposed by all sorts of things. It’ll be interesting to see what unfolds in the PRC. They have attacked the for-profit tutoring system, as I understand it, because they don’t want to inflict a Japanese-style winnowing process on their own adolescents. But they’ll need something. And the parents of the dullards will want to make sure it isn’t too painful on their offspring to the extent that they can.

“For what it’s worth, I never heard people on the east coast talking about debutante balls.”

My sense, in line with other commenters, is that debutante balls are more a Southern phenomena now, rather than an East Coast one.

I actually knew someone who had had a debutante ball. (She was from the South.) I remember being rather dumbstruck when she told me, because (1) she wasn’t filthy rich (or at least gave no markers of being such), (2) she was very nonchalant about it, and (3) she, well, didn’t seem like the type of person who would be a debutante. This led to me wonder if debutante balls have morphed into more like coming-of-age rituals for Southern girls, more like a quinceanera or a bat mitzah, rather than introductions to high society.

A long ago, I went to school with the guy who directed Metropolitan …

Whit Stillman.

I thought the movie Metropolitan depicted them as in serious decline in New York in the early 80s or late 70s or whenever that was supposed to be set.

According to the Wikipedia article, Whit Stillman wrote the screenplay between 1984 and 1988 and it was filmed in 1990; his original desire was to make it as a period piece, but he didn’t have the budget, so he added period details like vintage Checker cabs and avoided any specific contemporary references. So the answer to the question ‘When is it supposed to be set?’ is ‘At some unspecified point in the past’ [but certainly at a time when there is a sense that the subculture represented is in decline].

It’s a long time since I saw the film, but one of the details that has stuck with me is a scene where two of the male characters show up at the home of one of the female characters as if they think the group is going to continue hanging out together indefinitely, and she explains that she’s got a date for the evening and that the group’s not going to continue hanging out now that the deb season is over. She doesn’t mean that deb seasons are over for ever, only that they are over for a year, meaning the end for the particular social group they briefly formed together, not for all future such socialising; but the thematic resonance (I now realise) is there.

@13 The point of a debutante ball for the wealthy is to make sure children don’t marry outside their class.

Here’s an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Debutante_Ball

While debutante balls are, as far as I am aware, quite obsolete in the UK, certain Universities do have May Balls (which are now held in May, not June), and there are elite dining societies (Which are kind of like a British analogue of the Fraternity in National Lampoon’s Animal House, only much richer and more politically connected. The alleged incident in which our former Prime Minister, David Cameron, allegedly committed an indecent act with a boar’s head occurred while a member of such a society… See also: Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall.)

I’d always associated debutante balls and coming out with the aristocracy in England. It was a surprise to find the idle rich in the US slavishly imitating the rituals of inherited wealth. Of course I was very young then.

The UK season was abolished in 1958, only four years after the International Debutante Ball was started. Just another feature of globalization I guess, with rich people everywhere..