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Fancy Dress Party

on January 2, 2010 – 1:32 am

Fancy Dress“It was the best-ordered, the most cool, delicately lighted,  and enjoyable fancy dress party ever given in New York.”

IT is very rarely the case that an entertainment is so widely talked about and so long and so eagerly anticipated as was this — a ball which had even invited a rumor so disagreeable, even so frightful, as that the Communists meant to attack the house and to sack it, with its immeasurable wealth of jewelry, bric-à-brac, silver and gold, and objects d’arts, on this eventful evening. It is seldom that such an entertainment goes off so serenely, without accident and without a single untoward event, as did Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt’s ball of March 26,1883.

The guests on arriving at the white marble doorway in Fifth Avenue for the fancy dress party were told to order their carriages at four o’clock. As one entered the spacious hall for the fancy dress party, and was led by a powdered footman to the wide staircase, Costume- Bunch of Sweet Peasa sense of vastness overcame the gazer. The ladies were shown into a grand state bedroom, where a four-poster hung in tapestry stood at one end — just such a bed as one sees in palaces abroad, or in the pictures by Lacroix. Out of this apartment opened a fairy-like dressing-room, all mirror, painted over with apple blossoms, and with an alabaster bath-tub fit for Undine to take her swim in. Here gathered the ladies in their fancy dress costumes – Marie Stuart, Lady Washington, Mother Goose, Mary Quite Contrary, Carolina Cornaro, a Gypsy, and all the characters of the opéra bouffe, ready to go down to the fancy dress party when the time came. It was eleven o’clock before the company descended to the superb French drawing-room — Read more and see the fancy dress costumes ….

Victorian Christmas

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