Debutante ball bounces back

Glamour event steeped in tradition makes a glittering return to life, Xu Junqian reports from Shanghai.

Sparkling tiaras and wine, young men sharply dressed and women wearing gowns, a Puccini aria as background music, and presentations to society: the trappings of another era - and of the first Shanghai International Debutante Ball.

Guests on Saturday night might have been taken back in time, but the organizer hopes such events are the future. If, that is, she can find any young Chinese women who are up to snuff.

"For all these years, people have been talking about our nation's zeal for luxury. But I don't think people really get the point of what luxury is," Zhou Caici said.

"All they have been chasing after is material stuff. Now I am showing them the real lifestyle."

Zhou, founder and executive director of the ball, has been an active socialite in Hong Kong, London and her native Shanghai. Two socialite friends from London helped her organize the party, and it followed a Victorian script with some 2012 tweaks.

"Impeccable"

The setting was the gilded grand ballroom of the Shanghai Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, which occupies a historic building on the Bund overlooking the Huangpu River. Of course, attendance was by invitation only.

The 160 guests, with the men in tuxedos, began to arrive around 9, mingling under huge chandeliers and sipping Champagne from flutes. The music, although recorded, was operatic.

At 10 sharp, two uniformed attendants opened the heavy doors through which 13 smiling young women made their debuts. Each handed her white-gloved hand to her escort, and they began their first dance - to the title song from Flashdance.

"Everything is impeccable," Jennie Hallam-Peel said. She and Patricia Woodall had organized the Queen Charlotte's Ball in London and had flown to Shanghai to help with this one.

"Shanghai is a city very similar to London," Hallam-Peel said. "It can't be more appropriate to have a debutante ball in as modern as well as historical place as here."

Hallam-Peel had her own "coming out" in the mid-1970s, and she described the tradition as a "unique English identity" that should not be lost.

The tradition - mainly to declare the availability of young women, especially bluebloods, for the marriage market - hasn't fared so well since 1958, when Prince Philip said that presenting the debs to Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace was "bloody daft". The focus has shifted to charity work in a debutante's pedigree and includes middle-class families, not just the upper crust.