Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [763]
The social events held in these mansions grew ever more elaborate and competitive. The season just after the war featured six hundred balls, for which seven million dollars was laid out for dresses and jewelry. The ultimate arbiters of fashion were still European monarchs, though less Victoria now (since her beloved Albert died in 1861, she had taken to mourning clothes) than the Empress Eugénie. Her every move was monitored and interpreted by Mme. Demorest, the reigning monarch of New York fashion, in her Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly Magazine and Mme. Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions (as well as in, after 1867, the new Harper’s Bazaar). Madame’s correspondents reported instantly on every new Worth gown the empress wore to a Tuileries ball, and in New York the imperial styles were reproduced, exhibited in semiannual shows, and sold as finished garments or as patterns for seamstresses to follow. (Mme. Demorest’s 14th Street workshops generated tons of these multicolored tissue-paper patterns and distributed them throughout the country via three hundred agents and by catalog mailings). The more daring fashions of the Parisian demimondaines received similar treatment, though modulated appropriately for American women (in Mme. Demorest’s words, stripped of “coarseness or exaggerations” so as not “to vitiate and deprave the public taste”). In fashion, as in finance, New York remained Europe’s gateway to the American continent.
Fashion dictated the demise of the crinoline and the birth of the bustle. Dresses (both day and evening) gradually flattened in front while gathering at the back, assisted by the bustle, a half-cage or puff filled with horsehair or stiffened gauze and net. (This was not a new invention, having been favored in the eighteenth century, when it was known more forthrightly as a “false bum.”) Dresses cascaded down over this precipice to flow out (by the mid-1870s) into a trailing train. This appendage proved something of a safety hazard as, in an age of open fireplaces, it tended to catch fire while the wearer was dancing. Ladies’ advice books urged fireproofing trams with a mixture of whitening and starch.
While it was acceptable to flaunt wealth by having diamonds sown into one’s dress, moralists did raise alarms at the way 1870s fashions—and their underlying corsets, bustles, and breast-heavers—created a voluptuous display of propped-up bosoms. In 1868 Harriet Beecher Stowe launched a violent attack on “outré unnatural fashion,” claiming that despite all Demorest’s modifications, trends were being set by “the most dissipated foreign circles”—those immoral Parisian demimondaines who “live[d] only for the senses,” lacked “family ties,” and adorned themselves “to attract men and hide the ravages of dissipation.” Such admonitions got nowhere. Indeed, very rich women began buying some of the forty gowns they would need each Season directly from Worth in Paris, at twenty-five hundred dollars a dress.
Dresses like these were too good to waste on small private parties, and social events increasingly switched to more public spaces. In the early 1870s Archibald Grade King gave a debutante ball for his daughter at Delmonico’s; Belmont threw one there in 1875 for his daughter that was reportedly “more splendid than the famous one given the previous year in London by the Prince of Wales.” The only thing better than outdoing European aristocrats was marrying them. The first “dollar princesses” appeared as cash-poor Eurocrats lined up to wed Manhattan’s daughters: among the first was Leonard Jerome’s Jennie, who, after lengthy negotiations over her dowry, was married off to Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874.
Substantial wardrobes were de rigueur as well for appearances at theater and concert hall. Wealthy New Yorkers mingled with other classes in the Union Square Rialto. They would