For years, to keep company in Boston's highest society - with, say, the Lowells or the Cabots or the Saltonstalls - the unwritten Brahmin code dictated that less was more. Your zip code might be pricey, but your home was hidden behind a hedge. Your clothes gave away nothing. Brown shoes and blue suits for men, frocks set off by a strand of the family pearls for women. Fetes were known to feature tomato soup from a can.
Then the big money of recent decades made showy indulgence fashionable, the $12,500-a-month apartment rental at the Mandarin Oriental, the $1,095 Christian Louboutin patent leather slingback at Barney's New York, the $44 entree at Mistral. Boston, many cheered, had been released from its unfabulousness.
Yet now, as the economic meltdown has made the rich everywhere less eager to show off their money, here in Boston, restraint feels like a return to ways of old, a resurrection of the Brahmin ethos, along with the scolding mantra: It's just not done.
Among the new practitioners of restraint is Ernie Boch Jr. The 51-year-old car magnate is known for reveling in his luxuries: a Citation jet, a $70,000 stretch Subaru, a compound in Norwood. Recently, he said, he fielded a phone call from Joan Rivers, who wanted to know if he would appear on her new reality show, "How'd You Get So Rich?"
"Listen, Joan," he said he told the comedienne. "I have the utmost respect for you, and I'd love to do national television. But I can't do it under these circumstances . . . The name of that show in this environment? There's no way I would do it."
Even when the show's producer, Mark Burnett, also producer of "Survivor" and "The Apprentice," called to plead the case, Boch was firm.
The new moderation is taking all forms, altering fashion, dictating purchases, curtailing conversations, shaping after-hours events. For some, newly restricted resources are forcing the change. But for many, sheer propriety demands it.
Lisa Pierpont, who grew up in Back Bay steeped in the traditions of old Boston, said understatement is suddenly ubiquitous. At the Boston Ballet Ball at the Castle at Park Plaza on a recent Saturday, she said, women's gowns weren't the usual couture. If dresses were the handiwork of known designers, there was no knowing it - or, at any rate, no one was telling.
"When the unemployment rate is 8.5 percent, it's really insensitive for anyone to be flaunting what they have," said Pierpont, editor of Boldfacers.com, which profiles the city's fashionistas and designers. "It's just not thoughtful."
Tamer tastes can be glimpsed up and down Newbury Street. At Ralph Lauren, men are shying away from orange-patterned dress shirts and favoring blue gingham ones, opting for charcoal pinstripe over glen plaid suits. "People feel guilty. They want to keep it conservative, not too flashy, given the times," said Anthony Sempey, the store's men's manager. At Longchamp, torso-size pomegranate patent leather handbags are staying on shelves and smaller purses in neutral colors are selling. "We have a color called graphite - a slate blue - that you could wear to a funeral, and it's been really popular," said Jackie Dupree, a sales associate.
Driving a car too obviously new is a mark of dubious taste. A high-end car dealership, manager said customers are requesting that their new cars be the same color and model as their old ones, so that no one can tell they've traded in.
"The first thing they say is, 'I need a new car. But I gotta lay off three employees, so I need the same color," said the manger, who declined to be identified. In one case, he said, a man asked that the tires from his older car be transferred to his new one.
Discussing good fortune is no longer couth. On golf courses and in club rooms, trips to Italy and the islands are no longer the stuff of polite conversation. Corporations are particularly insistent on low-key appearances. Jim Apteker, owner of Longwood Events, said that what he hears most from companies renting event spaces these days is, "Nothing ostentatious." To that end, companies are hosting more lunches than dinners, which lets them to cut out eye-popping wine lists, lighting, and flowers, along with valet parking and sit-down dining.
Boston's embrace of understatement goes far back, dating to the Puritan belief that material wealth was granted by God and that bragging about it amounted to an affront to God's authority, said Boston College professor emeritus Thomas O'Connor, author of "Bibles, Brahmins and Bosses: A Short History of Boston." The belief stayed with the Brahmins, old New England families, many with Mayflower roots, and cemented more deeply in the 19th century as robber barons built palaces in New York and Newport, R.I., and stocked them with art bought by the yard.
"Not only did they flaunt their wealth, they did it without taste," O'Connor said. "The Brahmins looked down on that, and didn't want to be like that."
Shabby chic became a Brahmin marker. The patched tweed jacket. The Saltine served as an hors d'oeuvre. The dented Volvo. The gala event attended in a tuxedo so old its hue was more green than black. By the midpoint of last century, Brahmin power was receding, as Brahmin assets and political influence dwindled. But the cultural imprint, some say, never washed away.
"Boston has a real back-to-Yankee-roots sensibility. Bostonians traditionally have had a hard time embracing their ostentatious side to begin with, so I am seeing a lot of folks return quite naturally to a more understated, modest style," Pierpont said.
Yet, after the years of the go-go economy, Bostonians might be forgiven if efforts to shade good fortunes don't match those of the old Brahmin. A case in point: A wealthy Bostonian, who asked that he not be named, so as not to appear to be flaunting, said that for years he drove a beloved yellow Ferrari. When the recession hit, the Ferrari's value began dropping and the car began to feel like a burdensome totem.
"It's hard to pull up in a $100,000 car when your neighbor is losing his job," he said.
But problem solved. Over the winter, the man sold the Ferrari. For a replacement, he bought a black Maserati Grand Tourismo.
"No one knows really what it is," he said. "It's more of a low-profile car."
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