Fashion & Fancy in New York: The American Monarchs.
Emilia Müller
Abstract.
This presentation explores the fancy dress worn by New York’s high society during the Gilded
Age. Trough the analysis of Jose Maria Mora’s photographic collection of the guests who
attended two of the most well-known fancy dress balls from this era; the Vanderbilt Ball and
Bradley-Martin Ball, plus the study of contemporary English manuals that advised what to wear
at these balls, I distinguish which were the fashionable fancy costumes, and acknowledge the
main visual and written references behind those fantastical sartorial decisions. My thesis
suggests that no matter how respectable these events became in late nineteenth century, fancy
dresses and their symbolic representations were still able to transgress boundaries related to
class, gender and race. This research will not only address these fancy dress balls beyond their
common and limited description as conspicuous social events of New York’s upper class society,
but will also interpret the chosen fancy costumes and their personifications as expressions of the
elite’s relation to political, cultural and social phenomena of the period. In the selected portraits
of the fancy dresses, I aim to discover hidden anxieties and expectations shared by this selfconscious group concerning its complex relationship with the European aristocracy. As female
guests included authentic royal regalia in their representations of noble women of the Old World,
their costumes went beyond the conventions of fancy dress' artificial nature. Through the
confusion of reality, high class New Yorkers acquired a noble past that only existed through
sartorial fantasy, expressing the hysterical need to overcome the lack of real blue blood in their
veins. As fancy costumes’ metamorphic ability has been commonly disregarded by dress
historians, this presentation advocates for its relevance in the study of fashion and in the
configuration of social and cultural identities.
Introduction.
In late nineteenth-century New York it was a fashionable trend for high society to
organize and attend fancy dress balls. These luxurious events that imitated a European way of
sociability became memorable social gatherings, promoted by the wealthy families of the Gilded
Age. These parties were different from any other events in their busy social calendars, because
costume balls meant wearing lavish fancy dresses, no less expensive and elegant than the most
fashionable garments of the period. These opulent occasions became the perfect opportunity for a
conscious display of prosperity of those who stood at the top of the social ladder, a small but
select group which had made their fortunes building corporate empires in the era following the
Civil War. Those chosen families were considered the accepted leaders of America’s selfproclaimed aristocratic society, and they ambitiously tried to resemble the privileged European
classes in every aspect of their social and cultural agendas, including the celebration of these
splendid fancy dress balls.
1
The most well-known and controversial costume balls of the era, the Vanderbilt Ball and
the Bradley Martin Ball recreated the exclusiveness and luxuriousness of French and English
court assemblies of the ancien regime1, and were quite different from the collective dressing up
of the past century. As Cynthia Cooper explains,
The fashion for fancy dress balls grew over the course of the nineteenth-century after a
shift in social mores at the ends of the eighteenth-century had made masquerade balls and
parties seem licentious. Private costume parties, where no masks were worn, became
known as “fancy balls”.2
While in the beginning of the century, upper class social events were just “small, enjoyable
affairs, without any attempt at unusual display”3, in the last quarter, these gatherings became
conspicuous opportunities for opulence and spectacle; the ball evolved from “a shabby grub to a
brilliant chrysalis.”4 In postbellum America, wealthy New Yorkers planned fancy dress balls for
commemorations and special events in their newly built mansions, but also in New York’s
fashionable and exclusive restaurants such as Delmonico’s, Sherry’s, and the Waldorf Hotel later
in the century. Although these parties were originally copied from European court society,
eventually private costume balls became hallmarks of New York high society’s leisure time as
they tested the elite’s ability to promote and afford such impressive entertainments, reaffirming
their privileged status and an adequate exhibition of genteel social conduct.
High society cherished costume balls because of their playful requirements, and every
detail was thoroughly calculated, especially the designs of the fanciful gowns. At fancy dress
balls, the guests had the chance to transform themselves through their costumes in characters
they were not in real life, thus playing with their appearances and identities as they wished, at
least for one night. However, these had to be respectable private entertainments and followed
certain rules and an established order; only a chosen group of people were invited, America’s
rich and privileged, and the costumes had to be fashionable and never too creative, other guests
had to always discern what those fantastically clad bodies were impersonating. Besides these
formalities, I aim to suggest that no matter how decorous these events were in late nineteenthcentury New York, fancy dresses and their symbolic representations were still able to transgress
11. Simon, Fashion in Art, 33.
22. Cooper, Magnificent Entertainments, 21.
33. “Current Literature”, Philadelphia Times, 1889, 391.
44. Ibid.
2
established boundaries related to class, gender and race. This presentation will not only address
the Vanderbilt and the Bradley Martin celebrations beyond their common and limited description
as conspicuous social events of New York’s upper class, but will analyze the chosen fancy
costumes as expressions of the elite’s relation to political, cultural and social phenomenon of the
period.
This presentation studies fancy dress balls in the context of late nineteenth-century New
York’s intense economic and cultural changes, and the consequences these transformations
brought to the city’s social configuration. Because of massive immigration and an extreme labor
explosion, costume balls, and their inherent intentions of disguise, will become complex
expressions of a society in constant tension. As argued by Esther F. Romeyn,
...economic growth, and unprecedented rate of social mobility, and the rise of commodity
culture made the tools and attributes of middle-class identity available to groups for
whom the possible extent of self-fashioning had previously been more or less restricted.5
The metropolis became a large urban theater, where avid newcomers could easily learn through
etiquette manuals and city guidebooks every aspect of the daily life of the upper classes. The
idea of dressing like someone different from yourself, in this case as a member of the higher
classes became an easy task thanks to the development of mass production and ready-to-wear
clothes that consequently blurred the existing sartorial differentiations between social classes.
Under these circumstances, clothes attained the dangerous quality of being able to hide or
transform the authentic social identity of the wearer. So, if the streets of the emerging modern
city already constituted a scenario filled with characters in disguise, with the ambition of
transforming themselves superficially, the costume ball develops as an exaggerated continuation
of this masquerading game. Paradoxically, in these fancy dress balls, it will be the higher-classes,
the prominent members of New York society that will take advantage of the fantastical dresses
and alter their everyday selves.
High class costume balls were comprehensively described in newspapers and magazines,
detailed articles included the names and some photographs of the guests in their fanciful
characters, as well as the decorations, choreographies and menus chosen for the special night.
Because of this, these supposedly exclusive social gatherings became open spectacles for a wider
public.6 This collective voyeurism of the upper classes, encouraged by the emergence of a
55. Romeyn, My other, My self, 5.
66. Montgomery, Displaying Women, 48.
3
“society journalism” in the 1880s had important social connotations. As established by
Montgomery, ‘Wealthy New Yorkers advertised their wealth and performed class acts in laying
claim to high social status. Putting themselves on display and into circulation was an essential
part of asserting and maintaining this claim.7 José María Mora, author of most of the photographs
selected for this presentation, became a well-known photographer thanks to the craze that
develop in the late nineteenth-century for the collecting of celebrity pictures. 8. As a market for
images of women at the highest level of American society developed later in the century, studio
photographers like Mora began to call themselves “society photographers” and became essential
features in high society events. The interest in being photographed in fancy dress reveals the
great importance guests attributed to their sartorial transformation. To negate the idea of
Cinderella’s “one night only”, the ephemeral magic was somehow captured for eternity, and
displayed for those excluded from the party. Because this kind of journalism spread throughout
the entire country chronicling the life of New York’s upper class, and the studio portrait was no
longer an attribute of the wealthy, a wider imitation of the elite became easier and in
consequence, according to Homberger, “aristocracy was demystified.”9 Under these
circumstances, the portraits of New York’s elite in pretentious and costly fancy dresses,
symbolized a deeper effort in maintaining a certain inimitability with the lower classes. These
pictures were not like other studio photographs, these were images of old Renaissance kings and
queens, magical creatures, exotic odalisques and peoples from foreign countries, this was not just
a sartorial game but a actual performance of difference.
The American monarchs.
As the majority of the fancy dresses worn at the Vanderbilt and Bradley Martin balls have not
survived the test of time, the costume photographic collection constitutes itself as the most
fundamental testimony in the exploration of these fantastical garments. 10 These portraits in their
inexorable black and white limited dimensionality, are the only sources of the visual
transformations of the guests and clearly evidence the dedication and great importance New
77. Ibid., 122.
88. Schweitzer, The Mad Search for Beauty, 259
99. Homberger, Mrs. Astor’s New York, 203
1010. Some exceptions are two dresses in the Textile and Costume Collection of the Museum of the City
of New York: Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt dress of “Electric Light” worn at the Vanderbilt Ball in 1883
and Mrs. Elliot F. Shepard “Marquise” costume worn at the Bradley Martin Ball in 1897.
4
Yorkers attributed to these fashionable amusements. Each portrait encloses a miniature theatre,
where the subjects exhibit a silent but nevertheless compelling sartorial monologue evoking a
fabricated time and space different from that of Gilded Age New York. Its ambiguous
authenticity is conveyed by the expected accuracy of the costumes and of the surrounding
constructed props and architectural landscapes provided by the photographer.11 Some guests even
take recognizable bodily attitudes of the characters they are impersonating, thus heightening the
sense of reality.
These pictures denote the possibility of escapism from the self, as the artificial
appearances provoke the total alteration of fixed identities, and a former reality is utterly
confused in the supposed objectivity of the photographic media. Although the garments did not
hide faces or promote subversive cross-gendered bodies, each layer of fancy costume still
conjured alterity and disruption from the historical present, and “the true self remained elusive
and inaccessible, illegible, within its fantastical encasements”.12 Costume balls depended purely
on the visual impact of the fancy dresss, it was only through them that the party could achieve its
expected unique essence.
In late nineteenth-century costume balls some characters were more fashionable and
ubiquitous than others, especially those that represented European nobility from the past. Those
attending New York's fancy dress balls conspicuously favoured the portrayal of royalty, and
court figures from the Renaissance until early nineteenth-century. At the Bradley Martin’s Ball
there were more than fifty women clad as Marie Antoinette, whereas for the Vanderbilt Ball no
less than twenty men chose to personify “Louis XVI”.13 Not only the French court was a
favoured theme for the invited, but its British counterpart was also represented, most
predominantly by monarchs such as “Queen Elizabeth”, “Henry VIII”, and noblemen like the
“Duke of Sussex”. At her ball, Cornelia Bradley was fully dressed as “Mary Queen of Scots”,
and in order to capture the splendour of her regal essence, Mrs. Bradley covered herself in jewels
that had once belonged to the Empresses Marie Louise, Josephine, and Queen Marie
1111. Sometimes total accuracy was not possible. The The New York Times exposed a Louis XV using
modern eyeglasses in the Bradley Martin Ball. “Bradley Martin Ball”, The New York Times, Feb. 11,
1897.
1212. Although the author refers to eighteenth-century costumes, the same idea can be applied for late
nineteenth-century fancy dresses. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 5.
1313. Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, 334.
5
Antoinette.14 Similarly, Alva Vanderbilt at her event, costumed as a “Venetian Renaissance
Countess” based on a painting by the artist Alexander Cabanel,15 clad herself with a row of pearls
that had been acquired from the collections of Catherine the Great and Empress Eugenie of
France.16 This approach to the noble European past by New York’s economic elite compasses an
interesting panorama, by including material evidence of royal regalia in the representations of
these noble women, the costumes of the hostesses went beyond conventions of fancy dress’s
artificial nature. These were false personifications that reunited true pieces of life. Moreover, it
was commented by the press, “that the quality of people who have these rare and costly gems
would never think of attending such a historic function in sham ornaments.”17 The adoption of
real precious stones of the European monarchy not only confused ideas about authenticity and
falsity in the fantastically clad body, but conceptions of time and history. By donning the jewels
of various queens of different time periods simultaneously, the wearers were embodying a
general conception of a female aristocracy with no chronological delimitations. As described by
Montgomery, ‘European structures and aristocratic accoutrements (personal clothing,
accessories) harking back to courtly societies were thus imported and adapted to the needs of a
powerful, wealthy business elite attempting to impose its leadership by buying history.’18 These
bourgeois women’s purchasing capacity, supplied by their husbands, allowed them to
appropriate artefacts from the European royal past and intimately use and display them as
expressions of their indisputable power as New York’s high society.
This attachment to European nobility was not only metaphoric as insinuated by the royal
fancy garments worn at the costume balls, but it was a constant preoccupation for New York’s
haute bourgeoisie. The eagerness for legitimizing themselves as the economic ruling class
instigated the upper class to emulate European aristocracies. New York’s imitativeness of the
Old World19 became a means to acquire refinement and also allow the bourgeoisie ‘to anchor
1414. Mrs. Bradley Martin sent agents from Tiffany & Co. to Paris to buy Marie Antoinette’s jewels in an
auction. Beard, After the Ball, 167.
1515. Hayden Rector, Alva, That Vanderbilt-Belmont Woman, 48.
1616.“In addition to the tiara, she wore a double dog collar of diamonds and rubies, a diamond pendant
that had been part of a royal rosary, a cascade of diamonds in the form of a triple-decker brooch, a fourstand diamond stomacher, a necklace that fell over the breasts of the stomach, a lattice over bodice of
small diamonds with larger diamonds with larger diamond pendants in some of the triangles, and Mme.
de Sevigny’s diamond starburst brooch, which date to the court of Louis XIV. For security much of her
jewelry was sewn to her dress.” Beard, After the Ball, 162.
1717. “The Bradley Martin Ball”. The New York Times, Feb. 9, 1897.
1818. Montgomery, Displaying Women, 65.
1919. “Americans as Money Spenders”, The New York Times, Feb. 21, 1897.
6
their new wealth in history and cultural achievement, and to set themselves apart from others.’20
By dressing up as royal figures such as “Henry IV”, “Marie Antoinette”, “Louis XV”, and as
“French Marquises”, high society’s men and women were borrowing a foreign tradition, and at
the same time, demonstrating a privileged knowledge of European historical and cultural
heritage. As established by Harper’s Bazaar regarding Mrs. Bradley Martin’s Ball, ‘The history
of costume is the history of the world, and no one can look into the business of getting up a fancy
dress without stumbling over a great many most important historical facts.’21 European cultural
expressions were conveyed in the portrayals of Shakespearean roles, eighteenth-century
theatrical characters such as “Lady Teazle” from R. B. Sheridan’s play The School of Scandal,
and figures from the French Operas La Perichole and Les Cloches de Corneville.22 (Fig. 15)
These fancy dresses expressed the need to overcome the ‘lack of tradition, glamour, polish and
culture’, a widespread opinion about the upper class in late nineteenth-century America.23 New
York’s bourgeoisie cultivated itself by conspicuously spending their accumulated wealth
imitating the exquisite lifestyle of European high society. They would afford the excursions of
the Grand Tour and the purchasing of Parisian fashions and European art for their private
galleries.24 But most importantly the upper classes had the financial means to acquire British
noble titles through transatlantic marriages.25 Each of these desires is revealed in the visual and
material language of the fancy dresses worn at the Vanderbilt and Bradley Martin balls. For
example, the stylish House of Worth designed most of the fanciful garments in Paris and some of
their inspirations came directly from European paintings that hung in New York’s gilded
mansions. This was the case of W. H. Vanderbilt’s costume, which was a replica of the Duc de
Guise in a painting by the French artist Albert Aublet from Vanderbilt’s own collection. 26 At the
same time, the personifications of different nationalities and time periods present at these
costume balls, evoked a pastiche of spaces and cultural realities encountered likewise in voyages
abroad, while the use of kings and queens’ artificial attire embodied the pressures of this false
aristocracy to legitimize its social position through the tangible connections with royal garments
and artefacts. Hence, costume balls illustrated through their sartorial exhibitionism the tensions
2020. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, 50.
2121. “The Bradley Martin Fancy Ball”, Harper’s Bazaar Magazine, Feb. 20, 1897.
2222. “All Society in Costume”, The New York Times, March 27, 1883.
2323. Stowe, Going Abroad, 5.
2424. “Mr. Vanderbilt’s Gallery”, The New York Times, Dec.10, 1885.
2525. Montgomery, Gilded Prostitution, 4.
2626. Churchill, The Upper Crust, 127.
7
and aspirations of New York’s bourgeoisie regarding their complex self-definition as a class.
America’s nobility which ‘consisted of robber barons, merchant princes and copper kings’27 was
considered ridiculous by the European aristocracies and questioned by New York’s lower and
middle classes who condemned the excesses of the bourgeoisie economic and political power.28
Thus, for New York’s self appointed aristocracy, based on the wealth of the noveaux riches and
the ancestry of the old Dutch families, the need to marry the nobility across the Atlantic, and
gain the cultural and genealogical legitimacy they lacked, became of paramount importance.29
Playing to be royalty in fancy dress balls was not just a childish diversion but it affirmed the
pressure and the longing to be incorporated in European aristocratic families. Through the
harmless superficiality of the fancy dress the aspiration could be easily achieved without the real
consequences of homesickness and cultural shock that these titled marriages sometimes brought
upon American heiresses.30 However, the circulation of images of New York’s high society
women clad in royal apparel through the press could have also contributed to the pejorative view
of upper class women as ‘gilded prostitutes’ who, as defined by Montgomery, were criticized for
marrying noble men only for ‘crude social ambition’.31 Ultimately, by assuming the role of
European royalty through the most grandiose gowns, high society demonstrated its confidence
and social supremacy in New York’s political and economic arena. In Beckert words, ‘By
symbolically appropriating the once-towering social position of the French aristocracy, they
made clear that it was they [the bourgeoisie] who now were at the pinnacle of society.’ 32 Maybe
New York’s bourgeoisie didn’t have blue blood in its veins, but through consumption and
fantasy the upper class momentarily changed history and became the most venerable and elegant
of the American monarchs.
Bibliography.
2727. Olian, The Gilded Age, 6.
2828. Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, 325
2929. Ibid., 211.
3030. “During this period sixty American women married the holder of, or heir to, a hereditary titles.”
Montgomery, Gilded Prostitution, 4.
3131. Ibid., 11.
32 Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, 334.
8
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9
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10