Having a Ball: The Gilded Age’s Most Outrageous Parties (encore)
It’s ball season! Time to wear your finest, certainly the time to dress to impress and call the carriage for your visit to the Gilded Age’s greatest party — the ball.
Balls were perhaps the most lavish entertainment one could attend in the Gilded Age — from Mrs. Astor’s annual Opera Ball for around 400 to smaller affairs for 200 or 300 hundred, that ball was far more than an elegant night out. Being invited signaled that you were “in” society, who you saw there often determined how you then navigated society, and whom you could introduce your daughter to indicated possible prospects for the marriage market. Balls were grand and elegant to be sure, but your every move watched, catalogued and judged. Go back to the Gilded Age to revisit ball season in this classic Gilded Gentleman episode — find out what you had to wear, how you had to behave, what you had to eat and even how to interpret the secret language of a lady’s fan.
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