The new Gilded Age: For billionaire weddings, discretion is out and consumption is in

Business Insider

2 days ago

Here comes the bride — and her 30-carat ring, A-list besties, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of outfits.
This summer's billionaire weddings have shown that quiet luxury is out, and conspicuous consumption — spending as a means of displaying status — is in.
When Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos tied the knot in Venice in June, the couple shared details of their wedding with the public within hours of their vows being spoken.
The guest list, which included Hollywood heavyhitters like the Kardashian-Jenner family and Leonardo DiCaprio and billionaire moguls like Barry Diller and Bill Gates, was on full display for paparazzi as the partygoers were shuttled between venues in open-air water taxis. The bride's outfits, including their expensive designers, were posted on Instagram, while an exclusive Vogue feature captured her final fitting. And the series of events leading up to the big day — the Paris bachelorette party and their two engagement parties — were professionally photographed and shared online.
"They're not being quiet about it," Josh Spiegel, the founder of Birch Events, told Business Insider. "They're throwing celebration after celebration, and they're constantly in the news."
Bezos-Sánchez's flashy nuptials mirrored, in some ways, a wedding a couple of weeks prior, that of Alex Soros, the son of hedge fund tycoon George Soros, and Huma Abedin, the political strategist and former Hillary Clinton aide. The more subdued Soros-Abedin union also drew a powerful guest list; Kamala Harris and the Clintons were in attendance, as were Jimmy Fallon and Jennifer Lawrence. The couple also gave the world an intimate look at the festivities, taking them inside the family's Hamptons estate, through an exclusive feature on Vogue's website.
These nuptials echo those of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant in the summer of last year: opulent, public-facing, and full of A-listers. Little discretion was involved.
"There's just this archetype now that's developing, and it's particularly at the very wealthiest tier of people that feel like they need to be international celebrities," Winston Chesterfield, the founder of Barton, a consulting firm focused on luxury and the wealthy, told BI. "It's not enough just to be really wealthy, to have huge yachts, and to live this life. They've got to be spoken about."
A callback to the Gilded Age
Not too long ago, billionaires chose an equally expensive, though more discreet path.
Take the 2004 wedding of Vanisha Mittal, the daughter of billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, to banker Amit Bhatia. At the time, reports swirled that the wedding, which involved renting out the Tuileries Garden and part of Versailles, cost eight figures. But there were few details about how that money was spent. The couple didn't pose for magazines or offer journalists inside access.
"We're seeing a shift in how the ultrawealthy approach weddings," Cameron Forbes, a luxury wedding planner, said. "The lines between billionaire and celebrity are increasingly blurred."
While the "garden variety billionaire" may still cherish privacy, many of the absolute wealthiest, the centibillionaires, spend openly and without shame, Chesterfield said.
It's a callback to the Gilded Age, when sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase conspicuous consumption. During that time, an immense amount of wealth belonged to an elite few, and economic inequality ballooned. Extravagant weddings, like Consuelo Vanderbilt's to the Duke of Marlborough, Charles Spencer-Churchill, celebrated that excess.
"Part of the story is the sheer amount of money — this is a lot more money," Ashley Mears, a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, told BI. "When you have a whole bunch more money in a system, you're just going to have a whole bunch more elaborate ways of showing status."
The rich today are getting richer. Seventeen people are worth more than $100 billion, according to data from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. As recently as 2017, Bezos was the only person to reach that threshold since Gates briefly did it in 1999.
If the criticisms of the rich popularized by 2011's Occupy Wall Street movement led billionaires to shy away from the limelight, and the pandemic, which saw the ultrawealthy quarantine on yachts and skirt rules with private parties, ushered in an era of stealth wealth, Trump's second election told them that it's OK to come out of hiding. America not only embraced a billionaire as its leader, but one who is famous for his ostentatious spending.
"When you have someone like Trump at the helm," Mears said, "you can spend without shame."
'There's power in that kind of visibility'
Social media has further fueled the turn toward loud luxury, giving everyday people an unprecedented look into how the richest live. The weddings of the wealthy used to get write-ups in The New York Times; now, thanks to all-access photos and videos, the public gets inside and rewards conspicuous spending with attention.
The Ambani wedding "exploded on social media," Chesterfield said, and that virality provided a blueprint.
"It's turned from how many people are crowding outside St. Thomas' Church on Fifth Avenue into how many people are online and talking about our wedding," he said, referencing the Vanderbilt wedding.
The seemingly endless public interest — Sánchez Bezos's first post of her wedding now has over 480,000 likes — fuels the competition for status.
"There's this impetus to show yourself more and to Instagram yourself, and it really, really takes the idea of conspicuity" to the next level, Mears said.
That attention isn't always positive, as history has shown.
The Gilded Age's conspicuous consumption led to a populist backlash, policies aimed at wealth redistribution, and the labor movement.
The fallout from the Sánchez-Bezos affair brewed online, and Venice locals protested the wedding in person.
Still, positive or negative, there's power in visibility, said luxury wedding planner Bill Folchetti.
"Whether it's intentional or not, it opens doors — business-wise, socially, everything," luxury wedding planner Bill Folchetti said. "No matter what happens between them, Lauren's now carved out a permanent place on the front page."