the 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:
  • smart set
  • uncool
  • look smart
  • fly
  • mod poser
  • poser
  • yuppie
  • yuppy
  • vogue
  • the new black
References in periodicals archive
The Smart Set and The American Mercury had the sort of counter-cultural impact on their times that the Harold Hayes Esquire had on the '60s, Rolling Stone on the '70s, and Spy on the '80s.
The Smart Set would be that "civilized minority" speaking loudly and audaciously.
William D'Alton Mann founded the SMART SET (1900-1930) as a monthly magazine of general literature with much the same kind of snob appeal that characterized his more scandalous weekly, Town Topics (1879-1937).
Deploring monogamy, Braden, a former Rockefeller aide, Kennedy campaign aide, Kissinger friend and hostess, public relations consultant, and wife of syndicated columnist Tom Braden, portrays herself as the perpetual jeune fille, chaste, yet irresistible to men, whose only aim is to gain entree to the smart set. As she puts it, "Joannie wants to get to go." This is her personal best.
In 1908 he became literary editor of the Smart Set; with George Jean Nathan, he edited the magazine from 1914 to 1923.
Soon, as book critic of The Smart Set, a job Dreiser helped him get, Mencken is editing, then blowing the horn for Dreiser's novels.
Like much of Birmingham, it's aimed at the smart set with cash to splash.
Now that the smart set have moved in along Allerton Road, to create what can only be described as South Liverpool's must-visit hotspot for bars and eateries, not many are tempted down Penny Lane, past the old Liverpool Schoolboys football field, to this crumbling pile.
Albums FREEFORM 5's Strangest Things is already being picked up by the smart set.
Over the noisy course of a 15-year run as book reviewer for The Smart Set, the magazine he coedited with George Jean Nathan, Mencken reviewed, by his own reckoning, some 2,000 novels, most of them, also by his own reckoning, the work of "100 percent dunderheads." Few things date faster than a cruel review of a bad book, but Mencken was no mere hit man: He was largely responsible for bringing Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis to the attention of American readers, and he helped put F.
For the pounds 1.2 million centre in London Road has been designed to feature the kind of opulence normally enjoyed by only the smartest of the smart set.
Watch the smart set on the French Riviera or capture the Italian magic of Florence, Venice and Rome.
In holding gay men responsible for AIDS because of what happened in the '70s and early '80s, Paglia leaves out the vast numbers of gay men who were not in San Francisco and New York during those years, and the many who were but had no personal taste for the goings-on of the smart set. Even accepting the lowest numbers about who is really homosexual, nowhere near a majority of gay men are infected with HIV.
Pursuing a career as a writer, Wright became literary editor of the Los Angeles Times in 1907 and in 1912 moved to New York to become editor of Town Topics and The Smart Set, where he remained until 1914.
Burton Rascoe edited The Smart Set Anthology (1934).