In the champagne and Pimm’s bar at Royal Ascot on Friday, Yvette Wheeler and her friends were on a roll. “We’ve got about 16 pints of Pimm’s here and we’ve already had a champagne breakfast and polished off three bottles of wine,” giggled Wheeler, a model and promotions girl. “ We’re going to sit here, drink all this alcohol and get as drunk as we can.” Rachel Keane, a hairdresser and one of Wheeler’s hen party, added: “No one I’ve spoken to here has seen a horse, or has any intention of seeing a horse.”

“No,” agreed Wheeler, wearing a revealing black Lycra dress. “We’re here for the drink and the partying.”

Royal Ascot is still notionally the premier event in the racing calendar, but these days, Keane reflected, “it’s quite Essex – it’s all about the fashion, the hair and the drink – I don’t think anyone cares about the races . . . it’s just a day out”.

Close by, as the Tannoy squawked that the Queen was arriving, a drunken woman careened into an upturned chair, sending a table of drinks flying. It sparked a round of applause. Elsewhere, women were marching into the men’s loos and being dragged out by the stewards, as wandering caterers dispensed Foster’s lager from blue back-packs into plastic pint pots.

In the Royal enclosure – insulated from the chip vans in the less exclusive areas – Patrick Ryan, a 45-year-old engineer, lamented the dimming of Ascot’s star. “It’s lost its class – there are too many drunken people – it’s turned into a big piss-up for people from Essex,” said Ryan.

Nearby, Ascot veteran Marcia Demariveles agreed: “I saw people falling over and rolling around on the floor yesterday.”

Her friend, Linda Hammond, sighed: “We saw a man being handcuffed by the police for aggressive behaviour and drunken girls propping each other up as they walked to the station.”

Attendance at Royal Ascot last Tuesday and Wednesday slumped to 40,000 and 41,000 from 55,000 and 51,000 last year, although numbers on Thursday, Ladies’ Day, held steady at 74,000. Some might be staying away because of the new stand, which was unveiled last year as part of a £200m redevelopment programme and has been likened to the terminal building at Stansted airport.

But the empty seats that confronted the Queen, Prince Charles and Camilla as they arrived in horse-drawn carriages probably reflected a wider social revolution taking shape. The traditional ties-and-hats British summer season – revolving round the likes of Ascot, Wimbledon and Henley – seems to be losing ground to socially smarter, more bohemian events.

These days the young, beautiful and socially sensitive are to be found elsewhere, according to Gabriella Windsor, aged 26 and 31st in line to the throne.

“Unlike traditional pursuits, such as Royal Ascot and Henley regatta, the highlights of the ‘young season’ are mainly determined by music – at local festivals and abroad, in all manner of clubbing hubs,” averred the daughter of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent in Country Life magazine recently.

Last week Country Life cemented Windsor’s analysis by featuring two girls at Glastonbury in its Girls in Pearls photo-frontis-piece. Their Glastonbury, however, was a little different to that of the massed crowds braving the mud. The girls – Freya and Georgia Broughton – were perched on cushions in a luxurious Maharajah tent at “Camp Kerala”, a “Rajasthani tented village” overlooking the festival where a tent for two and VIP tickets to the show cost £6,000.

While attendance at Glastonbury has gone up from 90,000 in 1997 to 153,000 in 2005 and over 177,000 this year, smaller festivals – such as The Big Chill and the Port Eliot literary festival – are also booming, reflecting a huge market for stylish but unstuffy summer fun.

“There’s increased competition for events like Ascot now,” said Henry Chappell, a 33-year-old public relations company boss from London. “There has been a massive increase in broader festival events offering a really wide range of entertainment and partying for a younger crowd.”

Alongside those factors, Harry Becher, a London-based 30-year-old who acts as a discreet “social fixer” to wealthy clients, detects another. “Like everything, Wimbledon, Ascot, Henley and other events have become so corporate,” said Becher. The danger is that a combination of sponsors’ logos and platoons of businessmen on paid-for jollies – while helping to keep events afloat financially – dim the atmosphere that the enthusiasts originally created.

Becher added: “People go there and just drink on the company expense account and think, hey, it’s a day out of the office, I’m going to get wasted.”

Chappell believes that some traditional events of the Season have begun to aim themselves too much at the mass market, with the result that they “have done extremely well in terms of attendance figures from people who are now classified as chavs”.

Last week, among the blazered rowing fans at the Marlow Town regatta, Thames Valley Police found themselves faced by “groups of youth who used the day to get drunk”.

Chief Inspector Dave Purnell observed: “We believe the general profile of young people who attend the regatta has changed over the past few years from those interested in racing and activities associated with the event to those who just want to get drunk and cause problems.”

Traditionalists say it’s just not cricket – which is also facing challenges to its traditional style. Johnny Bruce, a 42-year-old veteran Test-match spectator from Crouch End, north London, complains that sections of the crowd at cricket now insist on swearing and dressing up as Elvises and Vikings.

“I wouldn’t take my young kids to sit with me at, say, the Hollies Stand at Edgbaston or the Western Terrace at Headingley – the language is appalling and the songs are pretty bawdy,” said Bruce. “They start up just after lunch and occasionally it’s quite amusing, but most of the time it’s just moronic.”

Along with the songs, Bruce is growing weary of the trend for throwing empty plastic glasses up in the air during Mexican waves.

Those in search of more exclusivity now head for such events as the private raves thrown at s t a t e l y homes such as the Kimberley and Stanley parties, in Norfolk and Shropshire respectively. One fixture on the new summer circuit explained what’s going on among the young, moneyed and stylish: “You’ve still got the more trad events like the Cartier polo, but people are trading up to things like the Serpentine Gallery party, the Port Eliot literary festival and rave things like Stanley and Kimberley.”

However, another inveterate socialite, a 37-year-old writer from London, said that the sheer number of people with money who are hungry for fashionable fun threatens to take the shine off any newly trendy event almost immediately.

“Everything is being overrun by these marauding hordes of cashed-up kidults, all reluctant to give up their weekend drug habits or their raving,” she said. “They’re infiltrating everything.

“For example, the Hay-on-Wye literary festival used to be a bunch of older bookish types and authors. Now it’s this massive event on the social calendar.”

Even Glastonbury is not immune. While Ascot fears heading downmarket with chavs, old Glastonbury fans bemoan its gentrification.

As Felix Martin, of the electro-pop band Hot Chip, said at the festival on Friday: “Mums and dads with prams, all there together – it looks all wrong. I want those horrible, emaciated teenagers back, the ones who threatened everyone with flame throwers made from aerosol cans and lighters, and charged people a fiver to get through gaps in the fence.”

Additional reporting: Kelly Jenkins

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