bonfire of the vanities

English

Noun

bonfire of the vanities (plural bonfires of the vanities)

1. An act of burning, or otherwise destroying, that which is vain or a temptation to immorality.
   • 1900, Edmund G. Gardner, The Story of Florence, page 122:

     For the wild licence of the Carnival, for the Pagen pageantry that the Medicean princes had loved, for the sensual songs that had once floated up from every street of the City of Flowers — there were now bonfires of the vanities in the public squares; holocausts of immoral books, indecent pictures, all that ministered to luxury and wantonness (and much, too, that was very precious! ); there were processions in nonour of Christ and His Mother, there were new mystical lauds and hymns of divine love.

   • 1991, Proceedings of the AFL-CIO Convention, page 196:

     Our nation has experienced a bonfire of the vanities based on the greed of the high establishment.

   • 1991 February 25, Jeannete Walls, “Intelligencer”, in New York Magazine, volume 24, number 8, page 18:

     After the March issue, Tina Brown will scrap the magazine's “Vanities” photo section, which chronicles the powerful at play. “It seemed the right moment to make a bonfire of the “Vanities,'” says Brown.

   • 1993 September, Auberon Waugh, “Talk and Tattle”, in Spy, page 50:

     Hard by, two monstrously fat mamas and their offspring warm themselves beside a pile of burning bathroom cabinets ripped from the adjacent block of abandoned flats. A bonfire of the vanities indeed.

   • 2001, Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard):

     It does not simply represent a bonfire of regulations; it represents a bonfire of the vanities — the vanity which says that Westminster knows best and that Whitehall can devise one system that fits all.

   • 2012, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Liberty and Property, page 47:

     When the Medici fled and the French withdrew, the preacher's credibility was vastly enhanced, and his vision of an incorruptible Christian republic held sway for a few years, finding its most emblematic moment in a 'bonfire of the vanities'.