bonfires of the vanities

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.
   • 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...1900, Edmund G. Gardner, The Story of Florence, page 122