Tag: the gilded age

A scene from The Gilded Age, which debuted on HBO in 2022. Photograph by Alison Cohen Rosa, courtesy of HBO. Have you been watching the new HBO series The Gilded Age? As a reader of this magazine, you really should. You will eat it up. More than ten years in the making, The Gilded Age is the brainchild of Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey. The characters in the new show, which opens in the New York City of 1882, are arrayed in the same upstairs/ below stairs format. The engine driving the plot is snobbery. A family of the old Knickerbocker aristocracy, which lives in a staid brownstone town house off Fifth Avenue, is mortified by the presence of New Money—a railroad tycoon and his socially ambitious wife—in their newly built palace (designed by Stanford White, no less) across the street. While I’m no drama critic, I’ve enjoyed the performances of Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon, playing members of the Old Guard, and Morgan Spector and Carrie Coons, as the arrivistes. I even enjoyed Nathan Lane’s hammy turn as social arbiter Ward McAllister. The Gilded Age is not without faults: there are a few anachronisms, and the show tiptoes around the enormous economic disparities that beset the era (as they do our own). Still, come for the story and the acting, but stay for the costumes and sets—hats, bustles, and tufted chairs galore. The homes of the wealthy are decorated with swag curtains and passementerie by the bushel; they feature ornate plaster wall moldings and coffered ceilings; they are lit by gas lamps. The Old Guard favors John Henry Belter– style furniture and Hudson River school landscapes, while New Money goes for Louis—Quinze and Seize—furnishings and French impressionist art. The relative architectural merits of White, Richard Morris Hunt,