An abundance of wealth and time are de-facto prerequisites for admission at the Institut Villa Pierrefeu.

By Alice Gregory @ NewYorker.com for the Oct. 8 print issue, available online now

[....] Toward the end of the nineteen-seventies, Neri said, I.V.P.’s primarily European students were largely replaced by women from Latin America, India, the Middle East, Japan, China, and Russia. (A few years ago, one alumna, the art-collecting daughter of a Moscow oligarch, penned a widely mocked etiquette column for the Russian edition of Tatler, in which she advised her readers against hiring Filipina staff.) Of the twenty-nine students present when I visited, one was a Canadian C.E.O. and another an American mother of five; there were six young Chinese women, a few lawyers from India and Australia, a Nigerian chemical engineer, a marketing manager from Dubai, a Harvard Business School graduate from Honduras, and a handful of university students from countries that included Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico. The only three Europeans were an eighteen-year-old aspiring fashion designer from Portugal, a former Emirates flight attendant from Romania, and a Ukrainian cryptocurrency investor currently living in Singapore.

The women, many of whom had attended M.B.A. programs, were there not to learn how to make money but to acquire the gestures of having inherited it. The pursuit of such a goal might strike us as anachronistic, but the archetype of woman as family ambassador is as relevant as ever. During my time at I.V.P., Ivanka Trump’s name was never mentioned, but, in the students’ preëmptive smiles and refusal to talk politics, it was impossible not to feel her presence [....]