The Fleurs de Villes team touched down in New York City last month with a mission worthy of Fifth Avenue itself: unveiling five floral couture mannequins for the after party of HBO’s The Gilded Age For Your Consideration event. The evening shimmered with talent and theatre as cast members drifted through The Plaza Hotel’s Grand Ballroom to the sound of a string quartet, pausing to admire their botanical likenesses. Cynthia Nixon, in fine comic form, joked that she now hears “Ada!” on the street rather than “Miranda!” – a shift that must feel like travelling between centuries without so much as a change of shoes.

The ballroom swelled the scent of fresh blooms as guests sipped Gilded Gimlets beneath chandeliers while couture sculptures – created by top New York florists – captured the essence of Season 3’s costume designs by Kasia Walicka-Maimone. The characters Bertha, George, Peggy, Agnes and Ada materialised in petals and foliage, their coiffures, jewels and voluminous silk ballgowns rendered with obsessive precision by the florists. Fleurs de Villes also transformed the ballroom itself, dressing it with arrangements that felt lifted from a Vanderbilt soirée.

Let’s take a closer look at this important era in American history that inspired the Emmy-winning TV show.

HISTORY’S GILDED AGE

In the glittering dawn of the 1880s, New York City sat perched on the brink of modernity – an age where steel rails cut across continents, mansions rose in the Belle Epoch style, and fortunes swelled to dizzying heights. This was the Gilded Age: a time that looked glittering on the surface, but hid deep unrest underneath. The term itself comes from Mark Twain, whose 1873 satirical novel coined “gilded” deliberately – not pure gold, but overlaid with a thin gold wash. Beneath opulent balls and railroad empires, political corruption, poverty, and stark social division proliferated.

Enter HBO’s The Gilded Age, created, written and produced by Julian Fellowes (of Downton Abbey fame), a period drama set against this tumultuous period of tremendous growth and change in culture, technology, politics and class. At its heart is Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), a young woman orphaned in rural Pennsylvania, who comes to live with her two aunts on East 61st Street in Manhattan. Her aunts – Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski), the rigid old-money matriarch, and her more gentle sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon) – embody the resistance of “old New York” to the brash arrivistes.

Across the street move the Russells: George Russell (Morgan Spector), a ruthless railroad tycoon, and his ambitious wife Bertha (Carrie Coon), both the personification of “new money.” Bertha’s arrival in society sets off a fierce competition – she wants a place among the established elite, but Agnes stubbornly refuses to admit her. New York high society was notoriously closed off during this era, with just 400 “rightful” members according to social arbiter Ward McAllister, and many wanted to keep it that way. Meanwhile, Marian, caught between loyalty and her own path, dreams of a life beyond marriage for status. Her friendship with Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), a Black aspiring writer and Agnes’s secretary, opens windows into the period’s evolving social currents.

Historically, while many characters are fictional, they are deeply rooted in real tensions of the era. Some are inspired by real-life figures – for instance, the Russells echo the wealthy industrialists, or robber barons of the Gilded Age, and the show even references real architects like Stanford White. The series doesn’t shy away from major social debates either: in Season 3, issues like the temperance movement and the politics of race and class take centre stage. 

The Gilded Age is more than just costumes and carriages. It’s a richly layered portrait of a moment when America was gilded on the outside but restless and fracturing beneath – and its characters are living embodiments of everything that made that era so dazzling, dangerous, and deeply consequential.

The Gilded Age Season 4 is expected to premiere in late 2026 or early 2027.