From the Archives: In 1999, Silicon Valley’s Newly Minted Millionaires Were Brushing Up on Their Manners

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“Someone's got to teach the software savvy not to lick the knife.” So begins Robert Sullivan’s “Ruling Class,” a delightfully wry dispatch from the April 1999 issue of Vogue. At the height of the dot-com boom, when Silicon Valley was minting millionaires seemingly overnight, the magazine wasn’t preoccupied with soaring stock prices or startup valuations. Instead, it turned its attention to an unexpected phenomenon: etiquette classes for the tech industry’s newly wealthy. (With Vogue World headed to San Francisco in 2027, it felt like the perfect moment to revisit one of Vogue’s most delightful dispatches from Silicon Valley’s first tech boom.) In Los Gatos, California, software entrepreneurs were learning everything from proper handshakes (“not a limp fish, but not a bone crusher”) to European knife handling, business entertaining, and the correct way to navigate a dinner party.

This, after all, is classic Vogue. For decades, the magazine has understood that etiquette is less about memorizing rules than it is about documenting how people live. That philosophy inspired The Vogue Book of Etiquette, published in 1948 under the editorship of Millicent Fenwick, and continues today in our monthly column, Oh, Behave!.

The details are what make the story such a delight to revisit. There are lessons on how to hold a coffee cup while dining with Japanese clients and reminders to leave that novel accessory—the cell phone—out of restaurants. More than 25 years later, the technology has changed, the fortunes have multiplied, and the rules of etiquette continue to evolve.

From the Archives: In 1999, Silicon Valley’s Newly Minted Millionaires Were Brushing Up on Their Manners

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THIS WEEK IN 1974

On August 7, 1974, Philippe Petit stepped onto a high wire suspended between New York’s Twin Towers, 1,350 feet above Lower Manhattan. Over the next 45 minutes, the French aerialist crossed the cable eight times, sat on the wire, knelt, and even lay down before surrendering to police.

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