Few hoteliers become adjectives. César Ritz did, and the owners of his name were not entirely pleased about it.
Ritz was born on 23 February 1850 in Niederwald, Switzerland. Britannica says he learned the trade at the Paris restaurant Voisin, managed the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo, and met the chef Auguste Escoffier there. Richard D'Oyly Carte then hired him to run the new Savoy in London.
He opened the Hôtel Ritz in Paris in 1898 and a Ritz in London a few years later. Hotels bearing his name also appeared in New York and other cities. In June 1902 Ritz suffered a nervous collapse. He never managed the business again and died in 1918 near Lucerne.
By then his surname had already left the building. Etymonline records the adjective "Ritzian" by 1908. It dates "Ritz" to 1910 as a symbol of high quality or superiority. A verb, to ritz, meaning to behave haughtily, is recorded from 1911.
The adjective came next. Merriam-Webster gives 1919 as the first known use of ritzy, and Etymonline dates it, in the sense "classy, glamorous," to 1920. Merriam-Webster lists two senses: showily lavish, and snobbish or haughty.
The word then had a busy decade. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novella "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" appeared in The Smart Set in June 1922. The phrase "put on the Ritz," to assume an air of superiority, is recorded from 1926. Irving Berlin wrote "Puttin' on the Ritz" in 1927 and published it in 1929.
Etymonline adds a footnote on the legal side. Lawyers for the holder of the Ritz trademark asked that ritzy be deleted from the dictionary entirely. They suggested Ritz could stay only with a definition noting it was a trademark. Dictionaries, Etymonline included, still list ritzy as an ordinary lowercase adjective.