arriviste

Like with his media empire, Turner began his sailing career as a noisy arriviste, and finished as a champ.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 7, 2026

Her circle includes an aunt who is a champion wrestler, a resident Goth named Isabel and sultry Penny Century, an arriviste married to a wealthy magnate with horns on his head.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 3, 2023

Mr. Epstein may have been wealthy, but he was a Brooklyn-born arriviste seeking legitimacy and mobility among the moneyed upper classes.

From New York Times ● Dec. 17, 2021

Similarly, in Our Mutual Friend there’s lacerating satire of the nouveau-riche Veneerings and their aristocratic and arriviste hangers-on.

From The Guardian ● Jun. 23, 2020

Bobby, in contrast, was nervous and volatile, the chess arriviste of Brooklyn, a colt of a player, and as it was beginning to develop, the spearhead of the coming generation of American players.

From "Endgame" by Frank Brady

Yes, they must have seemed like arrivistes when they came out on top after a long period of civil war.

From Washington Post ● Dec. 30, 2022

George and Ruth are the sophisticated, wealthy ones; Clay and Amanda are the middle-class arrivistes.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 2, 2020

You think of the hippie arrivistes in the sixties and seventies, but, even a generation earlier, the place had been the site of a cultural retreat.

From The New Yorker ● Jan. 17, 2016

Over the years, charming upstarts, curious arrivistes, and dogged usurpers joined the original collegiate cocktails, which themselves evolved and degenerated to varying degrees.

From Slate ● Sep. 16, 2013

They resemble the arrivistes of the Gilded Age, which began in the 1880s when industrial capitalists amassed staggering fortunes, except that there are so many of them and they seem to be relatively anonymous.

From "Class Matters" by The New York Times