Turn up anywhere overdressed, and you’ll quickly find out that in Kansas City, elegance is greeted by embarrassment.
Whose embarrassment it becomes depends on whose nerve is stronger. But when a person wants to be seen, what does status look like? And who does it need to be recognized by?
WHERE MONEY COMES TO BE SEEN
The Hotel Raphael Bar has the sort of lighting that flatters both middle-management elegance and other beige decisions. In the north-east corner, an electric piano makes the atmosphere here credible.
Around it, Kansas City appears in its preferred evening uniform. The men in polos and khakis, or high-end sports T-shirts and cargo shorts. The women in cute, inoffensive dresses or blue jeans and black tops. All of this was surrounded by enough polished wood and soft light to suggest that the people here had spent considerably more money than anyone present intended to admit.
The women had dressed for a date. The men looked as though they had been told there would be parking.
Great sums of money change hands here to look as though you “work hard, stay humble.” Here, status seems happiest when it can be recognised without ever having to announce itself.
I had made the mistake of dressing for myself—arriving somewhere from somewhere else. This attracted the brief, involuntary looks reserved for people who have misunderstood the invitation. One or two perhaps thought I had understood it rather too well.
There were a few comments. There were no objections. In Kansas City, being overdressed is less a breach of etiquette than a test of nerve.
Outside, the air was cool. The yellow light from the Belle Époque street lamps blended the brown of the Spanish style architecture with the white-blues of the emerging night sky. The Plaza—as this area is known—was doing a brisk trade in recognition. Valets moved between restaurant doors and polished cars. Jewellery sat under hard white light. Shopping bags performed their small advertising duties. The cars were expensive enough to be noticed. Some for their size. Others for their sound.
The large SUV announced means. Blacked-out windows suggested their contents were classified. Matchbox-inspired sports cars announced an appetite for thrills. In the people around them, life imitated art. Some asked to be admired. For others, admiration had already been arranged.
The useful thing about a watch is that almost nobody needs one anymore. Those of the expensive kind are for people who sort of want to know what the time is – but not really. Indifference is the most expensive mark of success money can buy. On the Plaza, TIVOL has been selling Kansas City ways to recognise success since around 1910.
Inside, watches sat beneath glass like prisoners of their own privilege. They shone, either in the careful lighting above, or by their own self-satisfaction. It was impossible to tell which.
Tiffany, a saleswoman, approached. I explained that I might be interested in buying a Rolex.
“Of course,” she said pleasantly.
“Which ones are available?”
“Well, none of these I’m afraid.”
There were perhaps twenty immediately in front of us.
“Ahh.”
“But you can register your interest with us.”
“If I can buy it right now, would that make any difference?”
Her mouth smiled gently.
“There’s a list.”
The genius of the arrangement slowly revealed itself. A shop had filled its windows with things it apparently did not wish to sell to people who apparently did not wish to buy them. But once those people were told they could not simply buy them, the entire dynamic changed without so much as a flick of a conductor’s wrist.
“Well how does one get on the list?”
“We can take your details.”
Of course – we do have some other nice brands available for purchase this evening.”
WHERE WEALTH STOPS EXCUSING ITSELF
A few minutes west of the Plaza, the shops disappear. So do the valets, the jewellery counters and most of the evidence that anyone is trying to impress anyone else. The houses grow larger as the streets become quieter. Wealth ceases to look like something which requires proof. Here, it is a well-established fact.
Nothing here is actually hidden. It simply stands further away. Long lawns and old trees provide the security that walls might supply elsewhere. Limestone, brick and slate appear in quantities sufficient to make architecture feel permanent. Cars are swallowed by garages large enough to have opinions of their own. The principal extravagance, however, is space. There is enough of it here that nobody need hear—or see—very much of anybody else.
Every so often, all this distance gets dressed for dinner. Kansas City has a fondness for charitable balls, benefit dinners and fundraising galas. People emerge from these houses, braving their surroundings to gather beneath discreetly lit chandeliers and give money away. The generosity is real. So is the accounting. The more interesting observation is how they compare their wealth with everyone else’s, and how gracefully the comparison can be made without appearing to make it at all.
It can be, like the city’s other great entertainment—football—a ferocious, full-contact sport.
As hard as it works and as humble as it wants to be, Kansas City is not above keeping score.
The Independent—the self-appointed journal of society—records the dinners, committees, chairs, benefactors and smiling couples who qualify on the circuit. Quiet wealth reluctantly finds its voice—and speaks with a surprising amount of comfort. With the magazine providing the megaphone, the competition of the softly spoken acquires names, photographs and sponsorship levels.
And the best part is that the spectacle is not especially private. If you want to watch, the event websites generally provide a ticket price.
No list required.
Anyone with the necessary dollars may enter the ballroom, eat the dinner and bid on the silent auction. Points scored in these activities earn recognition. And somewhere along the way, the event pays for itself. Perhaps it even saves an organization or two. Money allows observation. Status determines whether the room already knows you are there.
Back in Mission Hills, this is visible. The houses are quiet behind their virile lawns and elderly trees. There are no scoreboards in the driveways and no sponsorship levels engraved into the limestone. The competition has not ended. It has merely moved indoors, where generosity, recognition and belonging are measured with considerably better manners.
After all—as Mrs. Bridge knew only too well—in Kansas City, status still needs its witnesses.
WHERE STATUS COMES IN FROM THE COLD
Kansas City offers more than one way to be seated above everybody else. A box at the Symphony or Ballet suggests generosity, taste and a certain civic usefulness. Your money has not merely bought somewhere better to sit. It suggests that you helped make the evening possible. At Arrowhead, the arrangement is less complicated. A box there requires no explanation beyond the obvious one. Nobody thinks you helped invent football. One says that you help make the city. The other says that you have made it.
However, these two worlds collided for me at a ball for the Kansas City Ballet.
The dress code was black tie. Naturally, I showed up, being Bond, Frank Bond.
After checking in and surrendering my coat, I began the long escalator ride towards the ballroom. It took almost a minute. At the top, in the right-hand corner of the room, the Lombardi Trophy sat on a red cloth beneath the supervision of an elderly attendant.
It was Patrick Mahomes’s very first, no less.
It was scarcely believable.
I went straight towards it.
“Can I touch it?”
The kind, wizened attendant looked at me.
“You can pick it up, son!”
So I did.
The thing was simply astonishing. I asked a passing gentleman if he would take a photograph of me holding it. He obliged, although with the air of somebody agreeing to witness a minor indiscretion.
I offered to return the favour.
“No.”
“Why not?”
His answer arrived in its own time—with some delay—smoothly enough to suggest that it had been used before.
“Because I didn’t earn it.”
He was an elderly representative of one of Kansas City’s old banking families, and an important figure in its charitable giving. Whatever else he had inherited or accomplished was beside the point. What interested me was the performance taking place in front of the trophy.
He could not simply pick it up.
He had to be seen declining to.
In a ballroom devoted to the Ballet, beside a football trophy, two entirely different forms of status had engaged. On this occasion, our passing was incomplete.
“Earned” was an interesting choice of word. Kansas City is full of things which can be bought, inherited, donated towards or quietly arranged. Status is more difficult. It requires the right relationship with whatever you possess. Money put the trophy within reach. Knowing when not to pick it up can apparently count for something too.
I was born in the wrong country to have “earned” a photograph with it. I enjoyed my ignorance.
On this occasion, it was bliss.
At Arrowhead Stadium, home of the Kansas City Chiefs, the same game is played with fewer qualifications. A box does not need to masquerade as philanthropy, taste or civic duty. It is expensive, conspicuous and difficult enough to obtain that its meaning is understood without translation. The people below may not know who you are. They know perfectly well what it cost you to be above them. With luck, you can even be close enough to appear in Taylor Swift’s background.
There is something almost refreshing about the honesty of it.
Across the parking lot, Kauffman Stadium offers a different arrangement. A ticket can still feel like an occasion without requiring an explanation of your net worth. The crowd is less interested in who is sitting where, and often only intermittently interested in what is happening on the field. People eat, drink, talk, wander and return to their seats when something threatens to happen.
There is very little signalling here. There is very little need.
For all Kansas City’s interest in being recognised, this may be the happiest room in the city.
A good seat, a cold drink, enough money to enjoy the evening and nobody nearby who particularly cares who you are. Status needs witnesses. Elsewhere, money announces itself, apologises for itself, or waits patiently to be recognised.
In this part of Kansas City, however, happiness—rather inconveniently—appears able to manage without them.