Few events captured the excess of the Gilded Age quite like the fancy dress ball. Unlike a typical evening party, guests at these masquerades were expected to arrive as someone, or something, else entirely. Costumes ranged from historical royalty to literary characters, and women often spent months working with their dressmakers to perfect the smallest details. 

It was not unusual for a guest to take inspiration straight from the pages of a beloved play, as is the case with Miss St. Clair’s Midsummer Night’s Dream ball in the Camellia Grace Letters. A young woman might appear as Titania's mischievous servant Puck, complete with leafy trim and a sly grin, while her dance partner arrived dressed as the bumbling weaver Nick Bottom, or as the fairy king Oberon himself. Others might lean toward something grander, like Theseus, Duke of Athens, in flowing robes and a laurel crown. Literature and theater offered an easy, recognizable costume that still allowed guests to show off their imaginations. 

Once inside, the evening ran on its own set of customs. Every lady carried a dance card, a small booklet used to keep track of her partners for each dance of the night, often dangling from a ribbon at her wrist. Filling one's card with the right names was its own quiet social negotiation, and an empty card by the end of the night could be its own kind of embarrassment. 

Smelling salts, meanwhile, were a practical necessity tucked into many a handbag, ready to revive a guest who grew faint in a crowded ballroom cinched into a tightly laced bodice. Music filled the room for hours, often built around the waltz, the most popular dance of the era. Tunes like "Waves of the Danube," composed in 1880, were a fixture of ballrooms on both sides of the Atlantic by the 1890s, and were the kind of music guests would have recognized instantly and danced to without missing a step. For one night, fortune, fantasy, and a well-rehearsed quadrille came together to create the kind of spectacle the Gilded Age was known for.