Semi-Charmed Life

High Society

These New Yorkers must have been inspired by Gossip Girl when they decided to form their own preppy social club for those no longer in high school but are still yearning for that exclusive in crowd feeling.

 

Foppish scions in their 20s ascended the grand marble staircase, and sipped champagne in couture gowns, velvet dinner jackets and tuxedo slippers rakishly embroidered with Chinese characters. Those disinclined to formal wear still looked clubbable in Burberry check jackets, bow-ties and Hermès scarves.

Set against the intricately patterned oak parquet floors and the robber baron-luxe red velvet sofas of the Rose Club, the affair took on the air of Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred — if Mrs. Astor had been conducting a casting call for “Gossip Girl.”

But this was no ordinary cotillion. The black-tie party was for the Native Society, a new club that is limited to native New Yorkers, many of them city dwellers who might reside in 10021 — the ZIP code of upper Park and Fifth Avenues — or be graduates of certain prep schools.

And talk about pretentious!

Native sensibility. Native mind-set. Those terms were tossed around at the Plaza gathering. Like Zen monks marinating on the essence of nothingness, members tried to put their finger on that ineffable quality that makes them worthy of membership.

To Anne de la Mothe Karoubi, 24, who went to the Marymount School, it’s an intellectual precociousness. “When you grow up in New York City, our minds develop faster,” she said. “You’re not from Wisconsin, you’re not from the middle of America. We’re international, we’re focused, we’re driven.”

This part sums up my opinion clearly:

After a December party at the Classic Car Club near SoHo, the party blog Guest of a Guest cattily dismissed the group as “a sort of Saint A’s, the Princeton/Columbia faux-literary society that aspires to bolster social cachet through exclusivity but only serves as a safety net for the awkward in need of constant validation.”

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