Is Le Bal Des Debutantes The Met Gala For Nepo Babies, Or A Study In Modern Power?

What makes Le Bal des Debutantes unusual is its blend of fashion and its full-throated articulation of what power looks like now.

Does anything capture that quintessentially contemporary sentiment of simultaneous revulsion and infatuation like seeing images of Apple Martin – not the name of a cocktail but the daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin – being “presented to society” at a Paris debutante ball?

The idea of a debutante ball was irresistibly outdated from its beginnings, at least for Americans. A homegrown answer to Britain’s practice of parading women of newly marriageable age before the ruling monarch to encourage matrimony, the deb ball gathers notable daughters (often from American dynasties), who dress up in white dresses to signal that they are wife material. (A bit like shopping for a car, with a waltz.) It was one of the first signs that a country founded to reject aristocracy was nonetheless seduced by the pomp and circumstance of a ruling class. These presentations are as old as America itself; even George Washington hosted them.

As women began to marry later and high-society families splintered in importance, the balls became symbols of an old-world order, a signal that a young girl was ascending into adulthood and was destined to make a mark on society, even if that was just a home that warranted a spread in Elle Decor. (A proposal for progress: a debutante ball for 35-year-olds, established in their careers and finally ready to “get off the apps”.)

Yet American debutantes are still minted annually throughout the country and the world. There are the black debutante balls that seize the trappings of the elitist event to create an alternative high society; the big old-fashioned to-dos in New York City ballrooms that keep fur coat storage facilities in business; and smaller gatherings throughout the country, where shrinking pockets of old money and arcane knowledge of where to order white silk opera gloves remain.

The most delicious of these spectacles is the one at which Apple appeared: Le Bal des Debutantes, started in the early 90s by Ophelie Renouard, a French public relations executive who once admitted in Air Mail that she allows herself buttered toast on the weekends. Held at the flawlessly named hotel Shangri-La Paris, “le Bal”, per Ophelie’s Instagram, “celebrates excellence, the empowering of women, and the harmony between debutantes and cavaliers from all over the world”. (Cavaliers are society men, Habsburgs, counts and princes, often sourced by Renouard.) More recently, it has been crowned “the nepo baby Met Gala”, though the more charitable New York City Social Diary calls it “a modern approach to the definition of – to put it historically – ‘Society.’”

Le Bal captures the strange inanity of debutante balls – to whom are these women … coming out? – but it also reveals their deluded splendour. Whereas the traditional deb ball solidifies a social stratus enforced since the debutante’s birth, at le Bal, heirs to defunct monarchies and children of billionaires mingle with the finest spawn of Hollywood and other forms of corporatised culture.

Apple, for example, is the daughter of one of the world’s most successful musicians, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, and Gwyneth Paltrow, one of the most famous and last genuine movie stars, who almost single-handedly cultivated wellness mania through her company Goop. Paltrow herself is the daughter of Hollywood royalty, actor Blythe Danner and producer Bruce Paltrow, who died in 2002.

What makes le Bal unusual is its blend of fashion and its full-throated articulation of what power looks like now. There are no dated puffs of white silk here. The debutantes are dressed in gobsmacking designs by Giorgio Armani, Schiaparelli and Dolce & Gabbana; Apple wore a custom Valentino gown that allegedly took 750 hours to make. (It is hoped the petites mains queued up some good podcasts.) If you like looking at big gowns, this is an annual feast.

And then there are the guests. Money seems to be all around us, all the time, and yet infuriatingly invisible. (Why is everyone you follow on Instagram always on holiday? How did they afford that handbag? Why is there such a long line to get in the first-class airport lounge?!) Within this vacuum has emerged an obsession with decoding old- and new-money styles, with quiet luxury, with revelations about the ways that wealthy people secretly act or behave or dress. The wealth is there, if you know where to look. The truth is that there are so many people in the world that even 1% of them is a lot, and there are a zillion different ways to spend money. For every billionaire who gets his suits made on Savile Row, there is another whose entire wardrobe is sourced from Costco.

But here at le Bal is a picture of pure wealth coming shamelessly out of its bat cave, highly choreographed in some ways, yes, but darkly revelatory. It is an ironically egalitarian view of what it means to be rich. Gone are the antiquated rules that direct more typical balls. Being the child of a movie star is as important as being a royal – or, frankly, as unimportant.

The most essential debutante primer is Whit Stillman’s mini-masterpiece on Wasp (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) decay, 1990’s Metropolitan, which chronicles the December social season in New York that le Bal rebels against amid running commentary about the waning power of the old-school American elite.

Whit’s Protestant frugality meant he shot almost documentary-style, including capturing real debutante ball attendees outside the Waldorf-Astoria. The images are not glamorous, but even in their moment, nostalgic. And yet these Upper East Side preppies – or Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, as one character memorably names them – cling to the tradition.

Stillman’s characters scoff at events they consider nouveau riche, like the International Ball – where both Ivanka Trump and the Obamas’ daughters came out – and treat an Upper West Sider as a mildly exotic bird. The more meaningless the balls become, the more meaningful they seem to them.

That’s all well and good if you’re invited, but of course most of us are not. Instead, we have le Bal on le Instagram. Perhaps we all get the coming-out party we think we deserve. As Whit’s antihero says of the International, “I guess you could say it’s extremely vulgar. I like it a lot.”

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