AT Christian Dior in Paris, Kyra Kennedy, great niece of the late US president John F. Kennedy, carefully descends a grand staircase in a powder blue couture dress and towering heels.
The 18-year-old has just finished her final dress fitting before a social gathering on Saturday, one of the events of the year at which high society meets haute couture.
The glittering event will see 20 hand-picked “debutantes” dine and network the night away in dresses loaned by some of Paris’s most famous couture houses.
Lord George Porchester whose family owns Highclere Castle, the setting for the hit television series “Downton Abbey,” has also been invited along with Kennedy’s father Robert Kennedy Jr — the son of the slain president’s brother Robert, who was also assassinated.
“It’s my first time wearing haute couture so that’s really exciting, and I’m obsessed by the color,” Kennedy, an aspiring fashion designer, told AFP.
Others taking part include British royal Lady Amelia Windsor, the granddaughter of one of Queen Elizabeth II’s cousins, Francesca Packer Barham, granddaughter of Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer and Romy David, daughter of Seinfeld creator Larry David.
From Asia, there will be Akshita Bhanjdeo of India’s Bhanja dynasty, Filipino ‘It girl’ Monica Urquijo Zobel, and Rebecca Eu, the Canberra-based daughter of a Chinese health care company chief.
Now in her 21st year organizing the event, Frenchwoman Ophelie Renouard makes no secret of her quest to track down as many big names as possible.
In another publicity coup this year, she has secured the presence of London taxi driver’s daughter Lauren Marbe.
The 17-year-old made headlines recently when she notched up an IQ test score of 161, one point higher than Einstein.
“I read about her in the newspapers and so I phoned her up and she said ‘it is not my world but if you invite me I will come’,” Renouard said.
The event at the Automobile Club of France in Paris is based on the gatherings that were once an established part of the British upper class’s social calendar.
These launched well-born young women into society and — with luck — also introduced them to a potential husband.
But the event started to fall out of favor in the late 1950s after Queen Elizabeth abolished the practice of the debutantes also being presented at court.
In recent decades, they have been reinvented as glittering fundraisers with the emphasis on philanthropy and contact building rather than finding a husband.
Among the new generation of event, Renouard’s alone offers participants the chance to borrow a haute couture dress for the night.
“They are not interested in finding a husband, they are too young,” she said.
“What they prefer is the dress, because even if they are privileged they have never been to a haute couture house.”
In previous years “Le Bal” has attracted the daughters of European aristocracy as well as Hollywood A-listers such as Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, Andie MacDowell, Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone.
Donations are made direct by the debutantes’ families to the Children of Asia charity which funds underprivileged girls through school in the Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam. In the past decade Renouard has also been able to tap into the newfound wealth of countries such as China and India.
The event now has a strong showing from Asia but Renouard says she still has to crack Russia.
“I’m not good on Russia. It’s all about networks...,” she said.
As for next year and beyond, she has plenty more names in her sights.
“Every year in January we sit down and go through the files to see who we want. David Bowie’s daughter, I’m waiting for her to grow up,” she said.
“I also want Bill Gates’s daughter and I want more daughters of artists like Anish Kapoor,” she added.
Kennedy’s niece a star of Paris’ elite circle
Kennedy’s niece a star of Paris’ elite circle
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
