Customs: The New Elegants

Once they were called the beautiful people and were presumed to have titles. Others knew them better as the idle rich. But today there are few titles among them, they are not that rich, nor are they idle. Less grand than the grandest of an older generation, but also less ostentatious, they might be called the New Elegants. And they are not a numbered set revolving around a few Manhattan town houses and Newport mansions but a relaxed confraternity that extends the length and breadth of the land.

They are dedicated wives (generally to high-powered men who dabble equally in politics and the arts, wear dinner jackets and parkas with identical ease) and devoted mothers (generally to no more than four picture-book children with fanciful names like Chloe and Sabrina, Tared and Clive). Somehow they find time for charity work, church functions, community projects and college alumnae drives. They are enthusiastic music lovers (with a predilection for baroque quartets, German lieder and early Dixieland, an antipathy for anything atonal) and zealous art collectors (with a penchant for abstract expressionists, pre-Columbian sculpture and 18th century French furniture, a marked aversion to teak and leatherette).

They prefer concerts and auctions to canasta and golf, are likely to spend the time their mothers relegated to ladies' luncheons to tracking down a Directoire commode for the foyer, just the right bronze for the living-room mantle. If not elaborately educated in the mechanics of cooking, the New Elegants are nonetheless possessed of a sophisticated palate favoring simple Continental cuisine—everything light in body and definite in flavor, including the wines.

Sit Down at Home. But it is as hostesses, often to as many as 40 guests at as many as three sittings a week, that they are most practiced and most properly celebrated. Skilled in every facet of party giving, from the arrangement of flowers to the decision (reluctant but mandatory) to hire an extra couple to take coats and pass drinks, they have the energy to perform a well-worn role as if it were the choice part -in a first-run play, the ingenuity to plan a guest list with an eye toward a lively, varied pattern (putting banker next to deep-sea diver, Senator between pop artist and prima ballerina), and the social status sufficient to commandeer acceptances all around.

Lately, moreover, they have dismissed the short cuts—the vast cocktail party and the buffet supper—for the older, more elegant sit-down dinner.

Gone today from the boards that count are the stacks of plates and flatware wrapped in napkins; vanished, like the overhead light, are the women in sensible, street-length silks. More and more, the discriminating tables across the land are set with ornate silver on cloths of heirloom lace. And, gleaming in the dim, expensive light of tall candles, sit some of the handsomest people in some of the handsomest dresses that the age provides. The New Elegants have rediscovered the pleasure of dressing up.

Art after Dinner. The trend can be documented in economic statistics.