smart set

the smart set

Hip, fashionable, well-educated socialites. Our campaign has been co-opted by the smart set, and I think our original message is getting lost as a result. Our aim is to bring local restaurants and businesses to the attention of the smart set. His films are always looked down on by the smart set, but they always make a ton of money at the box office.
See also: set, smart
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

smart set

A fashionable social group, as in This restaurant has been discovered by the smart set. This idiom may be obsolescent. [Late 1800s]
See also: set, smart
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.

smart set

The fashionable socially elite. A late-nineteenth-century term on both sides of the Atlantic, it was sometimes used more for the flashy nouveau riche, as by Ward McAllister: “Behind what I call the ‘smart set’ in society, there always stood the old, solid, substantial, respected people” (Society As I Have Found It, 1890). In the mid-1900s it was largely replaced by jet set, and then by beautiful people.
See also: set, smart
The Dictionary of Clichés by Christine Ammer
See also:
  • the smart set
  • uncool
  • look smart
  • fly
  • mod poser
  • poser
  • yuppie
  • yuppy
  • vogue
  • the new black
References in periodicals archive
The Smart Set, a Magazine of Cleverness ran from 1900 to 1924, implicitly catering to a leisure-class readership and tending to speak to their tastes: Witticisms abound--about divorce, fashion, and fortunes acquired or lost.
BRYAN SMART set the early pace after racing in Doncaster last night at the concluding session of the St Leger Festival Sale when spending 32,000gns on a son of Bertolini, sire of his smart sprinter Moorhouse Lad.
SCHOOL SCOPE You're likely to make new friends at school this year, and they'll probably be part of the smart set. Group study sessions and trying to keep up with the smarties can only enhance your GPA, so you go!
After lames, the "'social' intent" of modernist fiction becomes to reconfigure traditional class differences between the "high" and the "low" into a distinction between "the intelligent" or "smart set" (to adopt the name of an American magazine later edited by H.
Katey is expected to join the smart set of American teenagers who are the Millers' neighbors at the exclusive Oceans Hotel.
Mencken consolidated his talents as critic and tastemaker and put them on a national stage when he migrated from newspapers to magazines, first The Smart Set and later The American Mercury.
The most successful of the recent wave of new works surveyed in David Patrick Stearns's richly detailed cover story "The Smart Set" (page 18), Floyd Colli ns conveys qualities so different from its musical predecessor-tight focus, gravity of tone, psychological complexity, operatic intensity-that the two works scarcely seem to belong to the same genre.
BellSouth Public Communications (BSPC), Homewood, Ala., the nation's largest stand-alone payphone services provider, has completed a six-month project to convert more than 21,000 customer fee-based BellSouth payphones to "smart set" technology.
Nathan and Mencken were notable contributors to and eventually editors of the Smart Set, a magazine of the arts whose writers aimed to counter the prevailing conservatism of American cultural life.
Amongst the smart set, and in the belles lettres that moulded their minds and reflected their self-image, morality itself acquired an aesthetic slant, becoming more subjective, a matter of refined taste.
Henry Louis Mencken wrote 30 books and contributed to 20 others; with George Jean Nathan, he edited the monthly Smart Set from 1914 to 1923; and, in 1924, he helped establish the American Mercury, which he managed until 1933.
From 1914 to 1923 he coedited (with George Jean Nathan) The Smart Set, then the magazine most influential in the growth of American literature.
Yardley's necessary cutting obscures how much of this sort of thing may have enlivened Mencken's reviews as they appeared in Smart Set, The American Mercury, the Sunpapers and elsewhere.
The first issue of The Smart Set, a literary monthly, was published by William D'Alton Mann.
There was even a magazine called Smart Set, started by "rascally old" Colonel William D'Alton Mann, "flush from picking the pockets of millionaires by means of his unscrupulous New York tattle sheet Town Topics."