Miranda Barnes’s New Book Social Season Reexamines the Cotillion
The tome shows how a ritual once rooted in exclusion has been redefined through community and creativity.
If you’ve ever wondered what unfolds inside a debutante ball, look no further than Social Season by Miranda Barnes, the latest book from Sofia Coppola’s publishing imprint at MACK, Important Flowers. You’ve likely seen the glittering images of Le Bal des Débutantes in Paris, but cotillions and debutante balls are two different events in the United States with their own distinct traditions. Barnes documents the youthful glitz and glamour of each in her new book, coming January 2026.
It’s helpful to make a distinction here: Cotillion, a term first used in 18th-century France and England to describe a group dance, usually involves etiquette classes for kids, culminating in a final dinner dance where they show off their newfound politeness and decency. A debutante ball, meanwhile, was historically for “debuting” young ladies as members of society. But as Barnes’s tome demonstrates, these modern events have come quite a long way since the 1700s.
Barnes stumbled upon the world of debutante balls and cotillions in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic; she decided shortly thereafter to pursue the sweeping project, zeroing in on Detroit as her locus of interest. A cold email went to Dr. Renita Barge Clark, who runs a cotillion program in the Michigan city (and contributes a text at the end of the book).
Between 2022 and 2025, Barnes photographed “young Black kids coming of age,” she tells me during a recent interview. The Masonic Temple, where the ceremonies took place, was a breathtaking backdrop of velvet, marble, and golden hour light. But it took years for Barnes to get into the groove of shooting. “And honestly, I’m still figuring it out,” she says. “I’m going back next year to make more work. And I only have six hours each time—not a lot for that many people.”
What captivated Barnes most was the creativity in the girls’ gowns: lace backs, bows, inventive silhouettes. “These kids showed up dressed,” she says, “and their consistency helped the visual language of the project.” In the photos, the fashionable details read as declarations of contemporary Black identity amid Gilded Age aesthetics. Cotillions may have begun as rituals of European aristocracy, but Barnes’s project shows how Black communities have reshaped that lineage—claiming, bending, and reimagining it into something entirely their own. “There are Black cotillions and white cotillions, period,” Barnes says. “There’s a stark difference—even in the music. They’re playing versions of ‘Hello Detroit’ by Sammy Davis Jr., for example.” The question lingering in the background is whether Black cotillions offer not just performance, but a form of cultural uplift: a way of preparing youth for worlds they will inherit and reshape.
An 1844 poem titled The Cotillion by Angelina Morris opens the book, and encapsulates beautifully the historical and cultural impact of Social Season. The piece describes Morris’s experience as a debutante—one of the earliest written accounts of the ritual in Black society. “Cinderellas without our brooms,” Morris writes. “The ballroom looked elegant, and the band / played waltzes and quadrilles. Colored New York / danced in its finery, forgetting work, / insult, and slavery in our land.” Long before cotillions became synonymous with white Southern aristocracy, Black communities were already using the rituals of presentation—dress, music, choreography—as tools of self-definition and cultural uplift. Those early balls were acts of assertion: a declaration of belonging in a country that refused to see it.
Social Season is now available for preorder from MACK.
