At debutante balls held across Australia each year, girls wear long white dresses and are presented to their communities.
Supporters say these balls give young women a chance to shine, while critics say they are sexist and outdated.
So why are deb balls still a thing?
Picture this — it's early on a Friday night and you're in a large modern function centre.
The room has hundreds of well-dressed guests holding wine glasses and chatting in hushed tones.
Standing at the top of an imposing Y-shaped staircase is a young woman in a long white dress.
It sounds like a scene that could be from a picture-perfect wedding.
But this is a different kind of dream moment for Melbourne teenager Jemma Borcich.
After many COVID delays she's finally at her debutante ball.
"It is really special to me because I know a lot of people don't get to do something like this," she says.
"A lot of people don't even know what a debutante ball is."
There's a long history to these balls, which began hundreds of years ago in England as a way for wealthy young women to make their debut into high society.
Think opulent ballrooms and stolen glances like in the series Bridgerton.
While times have certainly changed, deb balls, as they are better known, have not only endured but gained popularity throughout many parts of the world.
In Taylors Lakes, in Melbourne's outer west, Jemma is one of 10 girls taking part in their debutante ball.
The debutantes and their partners have all spent weeks together going through dance lessons.
On the day of the ball, they arrive at the function centre in a limousine before taking part in a professional photo shoot.
Inside the function centre there's a final rehearsal while organiser Lynne Rizzoli attends to last-minute dress and suit emergencies.
This is all before each young couple is presented to the room.
As Jemma and her partner Reid Burgoyne walk down those stairs, an MC reads out a little biography for them, explaining their future goals.
The audience laughs as the MC announces Jemma's goal is to marry a rich man.
Like Jemma, many of the teens write light-hearted responses — becoming rich is a bit of a theme.
As each couple is presented to the room, parents and grandparents hold phones in the air taking pictures, while friends stand cheering, clapping and pumping their fists.
Lynne says that's a bit of a recent fad.
"It is an 'in thing' at the moment to see who can get the biggest cheer when they first come out," she explains.
"I am not a big fan of that because I think every couple deserves a cheer and a clap."
At some balls she has to settle things down.
"We do at times have to pull it right back and ask people and families to tone it down a bit because it is not a footy match, it is a debutante ball."
Another recent trend Lynne finds a little inexplicable is girls wearing sneakers under their dresses.
"The other big thing they do now is swap socks with their partners so they will wear odd matching socks for whatever reason," she says.
While Lynne might not fully understand it, she knows these little quirks are ways in which young people are changing and modernising an old tradition.
It's something that is important to Lynne too.
At the balls she organises, the dances the young couples perform for their guests have always been a big deal and go well beyond the traditional waltz usually seen at these events.
It's why Lynne thinks her balls have such a large following.
"Because our balls are interesting, fun, they are not repetitive, they are not boring, we are very lucky we get a good crowd," she says.
While debutante balls have a history of being organised by schools or church groups in Australia, today much of the industry has been privatised.
Lynne's company usually runs about 15 balls a year in western Melbourne, with between 400 and 600 guests at each event.
At the Taylors Lakes ball, Jemma and Reid's big moment arrives during their final dance performance.
Reid lifts Jemma onto his shoulder where she balances while he spins around the dance floor.
It feels like a version of that moment at the end of the movie Dirty Dancing where Johnny holds Baby high up in the air in triumph as they dance on the stage.
"My gosh, I was so nervous doing those lifts," Jemma says.
But afterwards she is full of excitement recounting how they "nailed" it.
For many, the most emotional part of the night is when the young men and women dance with their parents.
"Dad was nearly in tears," Jemma says of that dance.
For Jemma and Reid, debutante balls are a family affair.
Jemma's dad Andrew Borcich did his debutante ball with Lynne in 1988.
He remembers "horrible haircuts and awkwardly dancing with a girl for the first time".
These days he says the kids grow up a bit quicker and are better prepared.
He views debutante balls as a "coming of age" event and says it has been exciting watching his daughter's journey.
Reid's mum Peta Burgoyne also did her debutante ball with Lynne.
"It is a tradition that has carried on," she says.
"It gives the children of today the opportunity to learn how to actually dance with a partner."
But she says the dress styles are different today.
"We had big puffy sleeves and the big skirts and now the girls' dresses are more streamlined and strapless," she says.
For Jemma, the ball has the right mixture of old and new.
"I think it is a great tradition with a modern twist, which is perfect really," she says.
It is here that opinions on deb balls diverge.
For many, like Jemma and her family, debutante balls are a lovely tradition to carry on through generations.
But critics say it is these very traditions which are not compatible with modern societies and the improved status of women.
The daughter problem
Kristen Richardson became a bit of a history detective when she first tried to trace debutante balls right back to their starting point.
After a lot of legal and social research the writer "figured out it was actually because of the Reformation —not solely, but it was precipitated by Henry VIII," she says.
When the infamous monarch broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th Century, Kristen says "he got rid of monasteries, he got rid of where rich families put their daughters, their extra daughters," she says.
Kristen explains it like this.
Wealthy families of that era "would invest all their money in a single daughter and she would have the best [marriage] prospects".
Kristen says any other daughter in the family would usually spend her adult life in a convent, which was a far cheaper option for the family than raising the funds for another dowry.
With the closure of monasteries, Kristen says "there was just a huge amount of daughters released into the social environment and no-one knew what to do with them".
Families, she says, had to figure out a way to marry off more of their daughters.
In her book The Season, Kristen finds that debutante balls slowly emerge as a way of "fixing this daughter problem".
"It was a big deal because it was a formal launch and of course it would cost a lot of money, so you are making a statement about the dowry and class status and all of that, by doing it," she says.
The tradition continued all the way until World War I, but it is here amongst the huge social upheaval caused by the war, that Kristen says debutante balls finally outlive their original purpose of finding husbands for young women.
But interestingly, that didn't kill the deb ball.
Today, Kristen says debutante balls are booming in China and Russia and they are a big deal in some parts of the US.
They also remain a tradition many Australians have embraced.
The question is, how have these balls remained relevant to modern communities?
A country rite of passage
Maria O'Sullivan still remembers all of the details of her debutante ball.
The academic now works at Monash University in Melbourne, where she researches human rights and refugee law.
But before her legal career began, she took part in a debutante ball through her school in Canberra in 1989.
"There was quite a strict dress code so we couldn't wear anything that was strapless and we had to wear gloves, so I wore lace gloves.
"So that was all more about teaching us to be classy, if you like, and to dance," she remembers.
Debutante balls might have started after a split from the Catholic Church, but Maria remembers these balls as being part of the tradition of going to a Catholic school in Australia.
At Maria's ball, her dress had special significance – it was inspired by Anne of Green Gables.
"There is a scene in the Anne of Green Gables mini-series where she has this blue dress and I had sort of modelled it on that."
On the night of the ball, Maria's mum took her to her boyfriend's house, where the young couple had pictures taken.
"And then his mother gave me a card and little locket, so it was just all rather lovely."
Maria's older sisters had taken part in debutante balls before her, back in their hometown of Boggabri in north-western NSW.
In country Australia she says debutante balls have long been big social events.
"Boggabri only has a thousand people and they would have the deb ball every year … so that was a community thing," she says.
Today, Maria describes herself as a strong feminist but is still glad she did her ball.
She believes feminism and debutante balls can go together.
But Kristen Richardson isn't so sure about that. She generally sees debutante balls as being "an inherently patriarchal tradition".
For her, it is hard to ignore their history.
"Overall, I don't think it is compatible with feminism," she says.
"You have to ask, who is it for? It is never for lifting up the most vulnerable women."
A mark of wealth and class
In the wealthy communities in the US and even Russia, where Kristen researched debutante balls, she says these balls are often also used to signify wealth and class.
In places like New York, she says, some balls have celebrities attend and the events are covered by fashion magazines.
Television show Gossip Girl, which followed the fictional lives of uber-wealthy teens in New York, even recreated these high society balls for the screen.
In that show, rebel Serena faces pressure from her mother and grandmother to attend a debutante ball and uphold their family tradition.
But later Serena confronts her mother about this pressure.
"All you care about when people look at me, is what they think of you," she says angrily.
It's a sentiment Kristen agrees with.
She also believes these modern high society balls are about more than just a night to celebrate young women.
"If you are an oligarch or a new gilded-age tycoon in the US, I think it is a great way to launder your reputation, you know you create this great elegant thing and it is a great way to hide who you are."
But she says her research also made her realise that debutante balls have been taken up by a diverse range of communities, with different hopes and dreams for these events.
Chinese-Australian communities embrace deb balls
Michael Louey was just a teenager when he attended one of the last debutante ball held by the Young Chinese League in Melbourne during the 1980s.
"It was exciting leading up to the event, the boys went out to hire suits and we knew the girls were arranging their dresses," he remembers.
Ball organisers would pair young people up to do the ball together.
Michael didn't know his partner Lynette well but had played tennis with her brother.
"Back then it was a small community, we all knew each other," he says.
On the night, Michael picked up his date and took her to the St Kilda Town Hall where the balls were held.
What he remembers most about the ball was getting to meet new people, particularly the girls.
"It was a social activity more than anything else," he says.
"You met new people both male and female – I was 18 at the time, went to an all-boys school so interacting with females was something new for me."
The Young Chinese League ran debutante balls for 50 years in Melbourne, starting in 1938. There were also debutante balls held in Sydney for many years by the Chinese-Australian community there.
"The main aim of the Young Chinese League was to bring together people of a common background to interact socially," Michael says.
Michael remembers the balls as "a big deal".
But the balls died out in the late 1980s, and Michael thinks part of the reason was the growth in his community.
"There was just so many more Chinese people around, so you didn't have to join a club to meet somebody of the same background," he explains.
He also attributes the eventual decline of the balls to changing fashion trends.
"The concept of the debutante ball was to introduce ladies to society originally, I think in the 1980s it was becoming a bit irrelevant."
Mark Wang runs the Museum of Chinese Australian History in Melbourne's Chinatown and says the balls represent a particular time in his community's history.
He says even in the 1930s the balls were attended by second and third-generation Australians and began at a time when the community "became Anglicised after the gold rush".
"They started to do more things that were Australian customs, so they had Australian Rules Football teams and they had the deb balls and they had all sorts of things that were part of their Australian way of life."
Today he says there wouldn't be such a need for a specific Chinese-Australian debutante ball, instead young people from his community who want to do a debutante ball are more likely to participate through a school or private company rather than a cultural group.
But Mark still thinks it is important to remember the role the deb balls played in the history of Melbourne's Chinese-Australian community.
He's now planning a reunion for all of those who once dressed up, learnt dances and were presented at a Chinese Youth League debutant ball.
One young woman campaigns for change
Kiana Prewett always knew she wanted to do a debutante ball.
"I guess it just was growing up as a young girl seeing it on TV and the magic of it all and I just wanted to experience that," she says.
"And coming from a lower socio-economic class it just seemed so fancy."
In 2014 she had a chance to take part through her school Mount Clear College in Ballarat in regional Victoria.
But there was a problem.
Her boyfriend at the time wasn't able to take part and a lot of the boys at her school didn't want to do it.
So she thought of another option.
"I thought 'why not take one of my best friends', and they also wanted to do it and had no-one to go with," she says.
So she asked to go with her female friend.
But her school denied her request, deeming it as non-traditional.
"It was very upsetting I am a firm believer that yes traditions exist but sometimes they need to change and adapt with society," she says.
Kiana's dad was also upset by the decision, so he decided to contact Joy FM, an LGBTIQ radio station in Melbourne because of the potential impact of the school's decision on that community.
"I did have and do have a lot of friends in that community and it was disappointing to think if they wanted to go with a same-sex partner it wouldn't be allowed," Kiana says.
"That just seemed wrong and very discriminatory especially in an event that is already discriminatory based on class."
After Kiana was interviewed by the radio station and local paper, things started to change.
"It brought it to the public's eye and the public started contacting the school and the school eventually decided to back down and decided we will allow it," Kiana remembers.
The school did allow Kiana to take a female partner, with the principal telling media at the time that she wanted the school to create a more inclusive event.
While she had a win, Kiana still thinks there is more room for debutante balls to change.
"I still think that they are a nice thing but at the same time I don't think it has to be so traditional to have the same effect," she says.
What will the future look like for debutante balls?
After writing a book about the history of debutante balls, Kristen has come to believe that they are an "unkillable" tradition.
She spent a lot of time talking to young women about why they wanted to take part in a debutante ball.
Kristen says there are a range of factors which influence the popularity of balls including politics and culture, class stratification, family traditions and social media.
But she expects debutante balls to find a way to keep evolving and continuing.
No matter how communities change.
It's something deb organiser Lynne agrees with.
Back in Taylors Lakes, she's looking towards the end of her long run hosting debutante balls.
Across 43 years, she's taught parents and their children but doesn't reckon she will be there when their grandchildren are ready to take part.
Lynne knows not everyone supports debutante balls.
She has four sons and says "a couple of them think it is just a waste of time."
Lynne knows others believe the balls are sexist, but says she simply views them differently.
"It is more about the girls, and their partners, they are celebrating coming of age, they are nearly 18 years of age," she says.
"We are very family orientated, and we put on a night that is very much about families."
While Lynne might be nearing the end of her run as an organiser, she can't see an end in sight for debutante balls.
"It may die out a little bit, but I think there are always going to be those girls who want to be the princess for the night and they don't care what anyone else thinks," she says.
Credits:
- Reporting: Elise Kinsella
- Photography: Danielle Bonica
- Digital production: Sian Johnson
- Editor: Kate Higgins
- Graphics: Ben Nelson
- Video production: Melanie Counsell
