Aliénor Loppin de Montmort spends most of her days studying at school in Belgium, but on a glamorously special evening this winter, she dolled up in haute couture to make her official entrance into society — and make some new friends along the way.

On Nov. 30, Loppin de Montmort stepped out as one of 20 young women participating in the esteemed annual Le Bal des Débutantes at the Hotel Shangri-La in Paris. At just 17 years old, the French countess was one of the younger attendees, but she tells PEOPLE that her place in the tradition was carved out long before this year’s actual party took place.

“It was always a dream … being able to do it for my mom, because basically my parents met at the ball,” says Loppin de Montmort.

Considering how much of her family history is invested in Le Bal, the student says she was only in fourth grade when her mother first reached out to event founder Ophélie Renouard “saying how much she’d love for me to do it when I was older,” Loppin de Montmort explains.

Of course, her parents’ love story did somewhat heighten the stakes of the occasion, the debutante admits.

“It was this huge thing, and my parents were putting so much pressure on me that this was going to be the night of my life,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Mom, I’m 17. Please don’t put so much pressure on me.'”

Romantic potential aside, the teen says she was excited — if a little nervous — to meet the other debutantes, only one of whom she knew prior. Loppin de Montmort says Renouard typically likes to keep the names of other attendees a secret, and the ambiguity made the debutante a little “stressed” ahead of the ball.

“You don’t know who’s going to be there. You hear murmurs about it. You’re like, ‘Oh, who’s going to do it this year? Who am I going to be doing it with?'” the debutante admits. “I was really nervous about it because … some of my friends have done it in the past, and they’ve always told me that sometimes you can have a little bit of a competition with girls.”

Luckily, however, Loppin de Montmort was surrounded by young women who became her fast friends. “They were so, so nice,” she tells PEOPLE. “We were really happy to have a group of girls that honestly didn’t care, and we were all like, ‘We are all just going to have a really nice time, and then whatever happens later in the media, we don’t care.'”

As anticipated, there was some unfavorable media buzz following Le Bal. Fellow debutante Apple Martin — the 20-year-old daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin — faced criticism following a viral video of her and Loppin de Montmort at the event. Some were quick to judge Apple’s behavior in the clip, with social media users calling her a “mean girl.”

Speaking to PEOPLE, Loppin de Montmort was quick to come to Apple’s defense and maintained she was “genuinely the nicest girl ever” throughout the evening. “She really doesn’t deserve an ounce of what she’s getting,” adds the French teen.

In addition to her newfound friendship with Apple, Loppin de Montmort also hung out with Nicole Ari Parker’s daughter Sophie. The countess — a major fan of Parker’s show And Just Like That… — admits she couldn’t help but gush a bit upon meeting the 19-year-old debutante.

“I was fangirling. I was like, ‘Can you please make me meet Carrie Bradshaw?’ It would be my dream,'” Loppin de Montmort remembers of her interaction with Sophie. “Sarah Jessica Parker, that’d be my dream. She was like, ‘I don’t know her.’ I was like, ‘Please.'”

Once the nerves and fangirling cooled down, the Belgium-based student says the actual night of the ball wasn’t particularly stressful. The men escorting the debutantes arrived early, including Loppin de Montmort’s date, a longtime friend from childhood. The women arrived later, with flowing gowns, borrowed opulent jewelry and professionally done hair and makeup.

“I thought that the actual ball was just so relaxing, because you’re just with your friends and you’re with your family and everything disappears,” the debutante reflects.

She adds that it was really the day before the ball that sparked some nervous energy. Prior to the event, Loppin de Montmort and her fellow ball-goers convened at 9:30 a.m. to test out hair and makeup options with the glam team. After snapping some photos, each participant then sat down for a series of interviews, and the day finally concluded around 10:30 p.m.

As for fashion preparation, Loppin de Montmort says debutantes get the ball rolling as soon as they know their attendance at Le Bal is even a possibility. She explains that the typical process for choosing the perfect dress starts with discussions between the women and various fashion houses.

“My family is really close with Dior, so it was almost Dior. Then it was Dolce & Gabbana for a couple of months,” she notes of her own experience finding an outfit for the event.

Apple, for her part, wore a custom Valentino gown, making her the first Le Bal attendee to wear a custom Michele gown, as Vogue reported. The outlet also noted that it took Valentino Creative Director Alessandro Michele’s atelier 750 hours to create the gown.

Her strapless blue piece was “fashioned in six dégradé tiers of silk plissé chiffon, cinched at the waist with a black silk bow” and paired with matching blue Valentino sandals, per Vogue.

Loppin de Montmort says her own dress search was “a huge mess” as she didn’t find a dress until three weeks before Le Bal. She was set to receive a gown from a fashion house in Lebanon, but a local explosion affected their headquarters and damaged all of their inventory a month before the Parisian event.

Thankfully, the countess had a couture-filled closet much closer to home.

“I have the privilege of having this grandmother with the most beautiful dresses in the world. So, she was like, ‘Well, I have a dress.’ I was like, ‘My God. That’d be amazing. You’d be saving my life,'” she shares. “So two weeks before, I tried on one of the dresses, and there it was. It was that one.”

Her vintage black dress originally sources from French fashion house Emanuel Ungaro, and the event’s jewelry sponsor, V Muse, added an extra touch that just so happened to pay even homage to Loppin de Montmort’s family. She wore a diamond-encrusted bow-shaped Alain Boucheron brooch that resembled a similar gem seen on the cover of the book La Revanche, written by her mother Sandrine de Montmort in 1997.

And the accessory was selected by the professionals at V Muse without even knowing the connection. “They look at your picture and they say, ‘Hey, that would look nice on her and that would look nice on her,'” the debutante explains of the process. “They came out with this piece of jewelry. It’s amazing, my mom just has a huge shock. She almost screams and she goes, ‘Oh, my God. I know this piece of jewelry.'”

After the event, the debutantes and their dates continued the festivities with an afterparty at a nightclub, and Loppin de Montmort doesn’t think the fun will stop there.

“It’s an experience that bonds us forever, because we are the only ones that know how it feels, the pressure. You basically do everything together. It’s only for a weekend and then we have to go back to our normal lives,” she tells PEOPLE. “We were like, ‘Wait, I want to go back. I want to be with them again.’ So we all want to see each other again. We want to spend all our summers together now. We’re already planning vacations.”

Between all the families ties and the new friendships foraged, Loppin de Montmort considers her experience at Le Bal a total success. She says she intends for her own kids to continue the tradition, too.

“It’s an amazing experience. We feel so much privileged to be able to wear these amazing gowns,” she adds. “You feel like a princess for a day.”