Debutante balls are old-fashioned.  The word originated in France—it means “female beginner,” but refers to an old aristocratic tradition of presenting one’s daughter as ready for marriage.  She wears a white dress and long white gloves and “comes out” in society as being of suitable marriageable age.

Get the “aristocratic” part? This was in the time of mint juleps and Southern belles, people.  It’s time to give it up.

But today, debutante balls are more common than ever. 

In today’s version, the debutante is selected by a group of elite society.  She wears a white dress, usually an actual wedding dress, and is presented by her father to be figuratively meat tagged (but tied with a satin bow!) and ready for the slaughter (a white wedding!). Her hide is then tanned, branded as high society, and sold to a waiting group of Ladies Who Lunch.

These balls are often used as fundraisers, where parents of the debutante are required to pay a fee for her participations and guests have to reserve tickets to the events. 

In a sense, the purpose of debutante balls hasn’t changed.  Families with the most money are still the only ones that can participate. Girls still wear white dresses.  The eighteen-year-old debutantes even have their pictures in the paper, so, in a few years, who knows?

My senior year of high school, I got sucked into this high society tradition. 

At my private school, I could never get a footing in the social customs of the rich stay-at-home women who sent their children there. I had little interest in deciphering the codes of proper behavior buried beneath collagen smiles and Botox-silenced foreheads. There were hundreds of rules to be plucked from the overtones of “Gooooo Team!,” but I didn’t have the desire to listen. 

So when one such mother called my mother to say I had been chosen to be a debutante by a committee that she was on, I was confused about her motives. I wasn’t the traditional debutante, the girls bred to be the Hover Mothers of the next generation.

I was horrified when my mother informed me that she’d accepted on my behalf. The concept was abhorrent to me. Every year in the newspaper, smiling, glassy-eyed blondes, daughters of Dr. and Mrs. So-and-So stared out at me—I saw them as sad, broken down reminders of a moneyed society. It was so far from anything that held my interest.  

But, that final year of high school, I did it. I bought the white wedding dress from the bridal store and the white flat ballet shoes surely intended to send out high pitched signals for bachelors to start sniffing for a bride. I went to the events at the country club that served bite-sized plates that made you want to snack on your fist after two hours. I had my photograph taken for the newspaper.

Freshman year of college started after that summer of debutante hell. At school, I realized that there was no way I could go through with this. No matter how outdated a symbol I thought the ball was for a greater upper-class culture, these mink insulated people were still people and for them, and their often very small worlds, this ball meant something. I’d been chosen because it was supposed to be an honor.

I didn’t go for my next fitting in my wedding dress. It probably still sits in the bridal shop, buried in a storeroom, a dusty ghost of a life I never wanted, but someone did.