New money – Style

The finale of the second season of the series “The Gilded Age” came at the end of the year and went unnoticed in the pre-holiday bustle. “Kommersant Style” – about why you can’t miss it.

The Gilded Age is the American version of Downton Abbey, a series from the same creator, Julian Fellowes, that follows the life of New York’s high society in the late 1800s. The main characters are fictional, but the setting and era are definitely not, making the series appealing to those who enjoy costumed historical dramas with a modern twist.

The Gilded Age began shortly after the Civil War and marked the economic boom of the northern states. This was the time when the Astors and Vanderbilts were becoming the elite, when there were real social wars between the “old” and “new money.” Then the industrial revolution began, the suffragette movement was born, the first trade unions appeared, many geopolitical processes and conquests began, the fruits of which we still enjoy today (in particular, the restriction and further prohibition of child labor, the first antitrust laws). All the moments of the era are shown in the series – in perfectly composed frames everything is beautiful, smooth, the interiors are luxurious, and the characters are always dressed to the nines, with perfect hairstyles and makeup, and the men’s beards look like they’ve had a cool modern grooming.

With the growth of the economy came the rise of the industrial elite and the newly rich families, who essentially invented the very concept of “new money”, could not boast of social origins, but tried to compensate for this by excessive display of their wealth. “These people were extraordinary. You can understand why they scared the old guard – they didn’t see boundaries,” Fellows said about his series in an interview. “They wanted to build a palace – they built it. If you wanted to buy a yacht, you bought it. But the old guard in New York was not like that at all, and suddenly a whirlwind of glamor and fashion fell on their heads. They began building palaces on Fifth Avenue and gradually moved further north – so a great rivalry arose between the new and old families. The “new ones” created the very culture of luxury and consumption that has survived to this day.” The name “The Gilded Age” itself is taken from Mark Twain’s book “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.” In it, Twain and his co-author Charles Dudley Warner compared the situation in America at that time to “gilding,” a process in which a thin layer of gold is applied over another, less valuable material to create the appearance of prosperity, luxury and wealth.

In the series we see a complete analogy with “Downton Abbey” – the author uses fictional characters to represent the archetypes of the era: socialites with old money from respectable families of high society, industrial barons seeking career advancement, rich but unborn brides, impoverished aristocrats – seekers dowry From the real world we meet Oscar Wilde, for the premiere of one of whose productions (naturally) all the high society gathered, the President of the United States flashes, and during the scene of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge we see the married couple of the Roeblings – engineers who actually built it.

The cast is chosen perfectly: Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon play old money sisters – the first managed to find a rich husband and retained her view of the world. And the second (heroine Nixon) is not so lucky, and she is forced to rely on her sister, become her companion, and live at her expense. In a sense, they represent two sides of the “old money” coin – the sisters are the figures in the series around whom the narrative is built. Also participating in the second season of “The Century” are Taissa Farmiga (younger sister of the famous Vera Farmiga), Louise Jacobson (daughter of Meryl Streep), Carrie Coon, Morgan Spector, Denis Benton, and others.

The costumes in this series are one of the key points: they are complex, carefully made, and expensive-looking – both for men and women. Everyone remembers that corsets were an indispensable item of clothing for Victorian women; they lifted and supported the breasts, made the stomach flat and generally added stature and slenderness to the female figure. But, as is well known, they were uncomfortable to wear and severely limited movement. Therefore, in the series, costume designers, led by Kasia Valitskaya-Maimon, began to dress their actors in the same corsets, but with a modern touch of additional comfort, adding elastic materials that simply did not exist in those years. Yes, and during long hours of filming, costume designers helped the actors unbutton their suits and corsets to give them time to rest.

In addition to getting used to the costumes, the actors also had to work on their accents. Thus, the performer of the role of Bertha Russell, the wife of industrialist George Russell, said that she spoke on camera with a Mid-Atlantic accent, and there was not much time to prepare. “I’m not Meryl Streep—I don’t have a year to create a character. – she remarks. “I don’t spend years training to be a swimmer like Annette Bennett in Naiad, I work on my character every day.”

The other day it became known that they decided to renew the series for a third season – definitely, with “The Golden Age,” HBO attacked a new gold mine, albeit a more modest one, compared to “Downton Abbey.”

Irina Kiriyenko