Tell Me Everything: Dede Wilsey

The San Francisco doyenne and patron of the arts on what’s changed on the social scene, and what hasn’t, over the last few decades.

Dede Buchanan came down from Connecticut College to get her deb ball dress made at the Adam Room at Saks Fifth Avenue. The place was run by Ann Lowe, the designer of Jackie Kennedy’s wedding gown. “The people who worked in the Adam Room became your best friends,” the now Dede Buchanan Wilsey says from San Francisco. She was, to be fair, a very good customer. She debuted three times: in Dallas, in New York, and then at her own ball in Washington, DC, where she grew up. (Her father, diplomat and ambassador Wiley T. Buchanan Jr., was the White House chief of protocol during the Eisenhower administration.)

That grand event landed her on the cover of T&C’s June 1962 issue. “I’m looking at that picture framed on my shelf,” she says, “and I love it, because you can see I was just having so much fun.” It was an era when the introduction to society of young women was news. “At the International Ball in New York, my picture ended up in Time. It was the twist era, and it was shocking that I took off my shoes at a deb ball. And I just thought, Well, this is the way it’s going to go. You’re going to have good press and bad press, and that’s going to be life. Persevere.”

Other lessons: “It’s very good training for walking into a room where you know absolutely nobody. For the rest of your life, you’re going to be doing that, whether it’s an office or a social circumstance, or a board that you go on… It’s always a sea of judgmental faces in the beginning. It’s up to you to prove that you belong there.” Wilsey has led the board of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and is currently vice chair of the San Francisco Ballet and on the board of directors of the SF Opera, among countless other philanthropic efforts.

Right now she’s also taking charge of the next generation’s debuts. “I’m planning my granddaughters’ ball right now. Trevor and Todd, my sons, keep telling me, ‘No, Mom, they don’t like this anymore. They don’t like that.’ And I finally decided, I just have to give the party the way I know how to give a party. And besides, I hear the girls are very excited that it’s black tie.”

This story appears in the Summer 2026 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW

Editor-in-Chief Stellene Volandes is a jewelry expert, and the author of Jeweler: Masters and Mavericks of Modern Design (Rizzoli).

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