There is a whole genre of video now, in which a poised woman in a headband demonstrates the correct way to hold a teacup, or to leave a party, or to accept a compliment without flinching. What is unexpected is who is watching. The people in the comments, thanking her, are largely in their twenties.
The woman is often Myka Meier, an American who trained at a Swiss finishing school and under a former member of Queen Elizabeth II's household, and who runs Beaumont Etiquette to 684,000 followers on Instagram. By her own company's count, 44 percent of her TikTok audience is aged 25 to 34, a cohort the old finishing trade never went looking for and never needed to. Her British counterpart, William Hanson of the London consultancy The English Manner, has gone further: 3.9 million on Instagram and 3.1 million on TikTok, according to Time, which this year filed him among its creators as a sort of millennial Emily Post.
What makes this a business rather than a hobby is where the money sits, and it is not in the views. Neither of them is really selling advertising against a teacup. Meier's five-step course runs $495, she co-founded the Plaza Hotel's Finishing Program, and the demand that pays best comes from human resources departments. "A lot of HR teams say our teams are afraid to compliment each other," she has told Bustle. The videos are the shop window. The trade is corporate.
The younger audience is not an accident, and it is not, on the whole, frivolous. This is the first generation to have done its early twenties over video calls and text, and the first to be told, and to half believe, that nobody ever taught it how to behave in a room. The wider mood cooperates: 47 percent of Americans told Pew last year that people are ruder in public than before the pandemic. The anxiety is real, and it is monetizable.
Here is why I would not call the whole thing a bubble. The part that pays, the training contract, long predates the phone. The English Manner was founded in 2001, by another former member of the royal household, and it trains diplomats, executives, schools, and brands from Bentley to Bollinger. Hanson took it over in 2019 and aimed a social following at a company that already existed. Meier is doing the same in reverse. The follower count is the marketing. The invoice is the business.
And yet the wind does change. Manners have a renaissance roughly once a generation, each sold as more urgent than the last, and this one leans on a specific, temporary alarm. A following is rented, not owned; the algorithm that delivered a young audience can quietly withdraw it, and Meier's own line that "etiquette is your new superpower" is exactly the sort a boom produces and a correction forgets.
So: durable, or a bubble? Both, in different pockets. The teacup video is a bubble and will behave like one. The training contract behind it is a business as old and as dull as any other, and dull is the part that lasts. Anyone thinking of leaving a corporate job to do this full time should be clear which of the two they are actually being sold, and build the second one.
