WHY THE SEASON MATTERS

The Shape of the Year

Some dates are set by the animals. Red grouse cannot be reared and released, so every bird that crosses the butts on the Glorious Twelfth was bred wild on the heather, and the shooting waits for it: it opens on 12 August and closes on 10 December. The Almanac’s entry puts the matter plainly. “The date is older than the law that now holds it.” The Game Act of 1773 forbade the sale of red grouse before the Twelfth, and the Act of 1831 set down a season the moors already kept.

Oysters have a season for reasons of the same kind. Henry Buttes wrote in 1599 that “The oyster is unseasonable and unwholesome in all months that have not the letter R in their name”, and the bay oysters spawn from the end of June until mid-August. The Court’s Oyster and Champagne Evening is set in early October for no subtler reason than the one its entry gives: October has an R.

Other seasons are set by people being in one place at the same time. The Palm Beach Season, the Almanac says, “is not an event. It is four months in which a particular set of people are all on a barrier island three-quarters of a mile wide, and the calendar fills with balls, luncheons and benefits because they are all there at once.” The Winter Equestrian Festival at Wellington works on the same principle: “It is not a week one attends. It is a season one moves to.” A family that keeps horses in Virginia or Vermont spends January to March in Florida and goes home when it thaws.

The argument of this essay is simple. The season matters because it turns the year into a set of appointments that nobody has to make, and because only those who keep those appointments more than once can see what they hold.

An Appointment Without a Letter

Royal Ascot falls in the third week of June, and its entry calls it “the fixed point of the English summer”. The Palio di Siena is run on 2 July and on 16 August: the July race for the Madonna of Provenzano, who has had a Palio of her own since 1656, and the August race for the Assumption, since the Goose asked in 1701 to run again at its own expense. Henley Royal Regatta runs from a Tuesday to the first Sunday in July.

None of these needs a letter to say when to come. A fixed date does the work that correspondence would otherwise do. It gathers people who have not written to one another all year and puts them on the same lawn, at the same rail, at the same hour, and it does so without anyone arranging it. That is a considerable saving. A society that had to agree its meetings afresh each year would spend most of its energy agreeing them.

A date can carry more weight than the weather. In 2019 WWD wrote of New York that “the start of fall isn’t marked so much by Labor Day weekend ... but by the first major event of the season”, and the Almanac takes that event to be The Metropolitan Opera Opening Night in late September: cocktails at half past five, the curtain at half past six, dinner with the cast afterwards, all of it black tie. The city’s autumn begins when that evening happens, not when the leaves turn.

One Thing After Another

A season is also an order, and the order means something only because it repeats. The collections are shown in four cities in turn, New York, then London, then Milan, then Paris, and the entry for Paris Fashion Week explains why the sequence matters: “Paris shows last of the four by design”, so that its collections are seen against everything already shown, and “a house that intends to say something about the season must say it here or not at all.” Even the seasons on the runway run ahead of the calendar. March shows autumn and winter; late September shows spring and summer.

The order reaches back into private preparation. The Wardrobe, the Court’s morning in early March with a tailor and a shirtmaker, exists in part because of it: “A member who means to keep the season needs morning dress by June and white tie by December, and both take months.” The calendar decides what is ordered and when, and a person who looks at it only a week ahead arrives in the wrong clothes.

The Proms reward the same habit. For Last Night of the Proms, the Five-Concert Ballot is for those who have bought tickets to at least five other concerts in the season. The last night goes first to those who came to the others, which is a fair description of how a season treats its people generally.

What Coming Back Shows

Return is a way of seeing. A visitor who comes once sees an occasion; a visitor who comes back sees a change in it, and the change is often the news.

In 2024 the journalist Harry Cole found no restaurant in London serving grouse on the night of the Twelfth, “ending a tradition that stretches back to the 1870s”, after a breeding season The Telegraph called “unusually cold”. In 2026 spring counts across northern England and Scotland were still low, but by July many moors in the north of England showed brood averages above seven, and that night the Jugged Hare, the Hawthorn, the Cinnamon Club and the Shed served grouse in London. Neither fact means anything without the date to measure it against.

The Palio of 2026 shows the same thing at the scale of a city. Both races were put off for rain. The July Palio, run on the 3rd, went to the Eagle, its first win in thirty-four years; the August Palio, put off twice, went to the Shell, its first since 1998. A contrada that waits thirty-four years for a banner of painted silk is counting seasons, and the counting is part of what the banner is worth.

The Case Against It

The strongest objection to all of this deserves to be put at full strength. It holds that a season is a device for sorting people: a calendar of rooms that some may enter and most may not, whose fixed dates are simply the times when the doors are shut in public.

The Almanac does not hide the evidence for it. In Palm Beach, its entry says, “The galas can be bought into. The clubs cannot, and the clubs are where the season actually happens.” The Royal Enclosure at Royal Ascot “is not sold”; a first application must be sponsored by someone who has attended before. In 1920 Henley refused an entry from John B. Kelly of Philadelphia, who had been a bricklayer’s apprentice, as a man who had worked with his hands. A driven grouse day of a hundred brace comes to some twenty thousand pounds before gratuities, cartridges and rooms, and the sport’s opponents call the day the “inglorious 12th”. On this view the season makes wealth and connection visible once a year, and asks everyone else to admire it from the other side of the rope.

Much of that is true, and the Court does not pretend otherwise. Two things weigh against it as a judgement on the season as a whole.

The first is that the season has repeatedly been opened by those it shut out. The Metropolitan Opera was founded because the boxes at the Academy of Music were held by old families who would not let in the newly rich; the newcomers built a house of their own, and the Academy’s opera season folded three years later. Henley’s rule against manual workers went in 1937. Kelly’s son won the Diamond Sculls in 1947, and his daughter, by then Princess Grace of Monaco, gave away the prizes in 1981.

The second is that a great deal of the season costs little or nothing. The Hill at The Epsom Derby is free to anyone who books a ticket. The centre of the Campo at Siena is free, and fills from the morning. Promming tickets at the Royal Albert Hall cost £8, and some seventy thousand were sold over the 2026 season. Saturday Night Lights at Wellington is free. A day at The Deauville August Meeting costs from €5. And the Vienna Ball Season, its entry says, “is not a run of parties. It is a civic institution that happens to involve waltzing”: its balls are thrown by trades, by the coffee brewers, the confectioners, the doctors, the hunters and the gardeners, each on its own night. The closed rooms are real. The calendar itself is open to anyone prepared to keep it.

Keeping It

What a season asks is attendance over time, and that is the one thing that cannot be bought on the day. A badge can be sought, a seat ordered, a table taken. Knowing that the Coffee Brewers’ Ball and the Hunters’ Ball are where Vienna actually is, or that many good horses have lost the Derby at Tattenham Corner, comes from having been before.

The Court was founded in September 2025 and incorporated in September 2026, and its first season opens in January 2027. Its calendar is built on dates that others have kept for decades and for centuries, and its own evenings are set into the spaces between them: tea on the North Shore in August, oysters in October, white tie at the end of that month. It chooses a date for the reason the moors and the oyster beds choose theirs, because the thing is ready then, and it values a date chiefly for the fact that it will be there again next year.

At the Philharmonic Ball in Vienna, the orchestra’s brass open the evening from the balcony with a fanfare Richard Strauss wrote for the first one, in 1924. It has been played at every one since.