People since the Hilton era of reality TV, certainly since the Kardashian, be all “we didn’t USED to pay so much attention to the petty doings of the vapid rich". Girl YES we did, that was the society pages. Same concept, same audience.

(My father was in the society pages once. As an old-for-America commercial city, Philadelphia had a respectable “society” presence, and he escorted some girl to a cotillion in the ‘50s.)

Course they had actual aristocrats to fill that role in Europe. The “jet set” of the ‘60s was basically air travel making it practical for American “society” to merge with the Eurotrash in seaside resorts, rather than the distinct continental and Vineyard-Palm Beach-Pasadena circuits they’d had before.

That kind of faded as time went on, maybe countercultural anti-rich-WASPiness. Maybe that as superstructure to the relative eclipse of heirs after the New Deal and publicly held Managerial Revolution. (Eclipsed by professionals, as “bright young things”, heroic engineers and surgeons, “yuppies”, “symbolic manipulators”, the “creative class”?)

Writings of the 80s often describe the period as particularly celebrity-obsessed, that always struck me as odd. Maybe we’re still swimming in that world and can’t notice the water. But Beatlemania was in the ‘60s, Hollywood celebrity fandom predates WWII. (I do notice that models seemed to become celebrities more in the 80s-90s, where now it seems more celebrities from some other field are used as models.)

I think I’m starting to realize that part of it is “celebrity” started filling that “society” niche. Part of it was celebrities claiming some authority(-from-authenticity) to intervene in society, especially in the “New Hollywood” of the ‘70s - Brando sending Sacheen Littlefeather in his place to the Oscars, Jane Fonda in Vietnam, Warren Beatty reminding America of its communist traditions. That’s when it became normal for movie stars to “have a cause”. And then into the ‘80s in music, Live Aid, Band Aid, Farm Aid, Bono. Fuckin’ Bono.

Of course, a lot of this just turned into charity-for-the-purpose-of-attention-getting, but how do you think all those society charity balls worked?

I suppose the transition moment from “society” to “celebrity” would be Henry Kissinger at Studio 54.

Of course actual royalty is still a thing, in the older-tilting supermarket tabloids. The Charles-Diana wedding in '81 was huge in the states, a lot of contemporaries linked that to cultural retrenchment after the '70s went off the rails (heterosexual monogamous monarchy, hard to top that for tradition).

And if now we’re back, on reality TV and Instagram, to gawking at the callow rich and their hangers-on, courtiers and courtesans, well, we’ve been there before.