Never had one of my Russian clients ever say to me, ‘Are you serious?'
June 9, 2017 5:59 PM   Subscribe

Do you enjoy flipping through bridal magazines? How about hating on the ultra-rich? Why not do both with this article in Racked about the wedding planners to the 0.01%?
posted by jacquilynne (30 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
My main takeaways from reading this article:
The ultra-rich really like to have their flowers designed so that the people on each side of a table don't have to see each other.
The wedding planners aren't exactly incentivized to keep costs down: " Now she charges the client a percentage of everything she touches — between 18 and 20 percent of the total budget — because events that clients imagined as small when they were starting out had a way of ballooning way past budget."
If you're really rich, you can force your waiters to wear ridiculous costumes to your wedding. If you're really, really rich you can force your guests to wear ridiculous costumes to your wedding.

Also, I would totally go to any of those weddings. Even in an elf costume.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:03 PM on June 9, 2017 [5 favorites]


Oh gosh, I would totally, totally go to one of those weddings, even in an elf costume. Maybe especially in an elf costume. And then I would dine out on that story for the rest of my life.

Having said that, I think she's talking about a pretty specific subset of extremely rich people. I've known some extremely rich people who I think would be pretty mortified to have a wedding like that.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:30 PM on June 9, 2017 [3 favorites]


There's an interesting bit about old and new money in the article -- that the fifth generation Vanderbilts or whomever want to have nice weddings, but not ones that are splashy for the sake of being splashy. And also that they tend to put their nannies who raised them at the head table, which is simultaneously a little sad and totally charming.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:33 PM on June 9, 2017 [13 favorites]


Couture brides make an average of five trips to Monique’s atelier in Los Angeles for the fittings, from as far away as London, the Philippines, and Australia.

It's amazing how much time and effort it takes to have literally everything done for you.
posted by klanawa at 6:38 PM on June 9, 2017 [8 favorites]


It's amazing how much time and effort it takes to have literally everything done for you.

Perhaps it goes into making it feel like it's not all being done for you.
posted by solarion at 6:42 PM on June 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


I think it may just be an excuse to take some fun trips to LA.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:43 PM on June 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


Dunno about this. Rich or not, I am still a little bitter about how my wedding went from me doing 50% of the planning to me only getting to pick out the tuxes. How we went from close friends and close family (Around 30 people at the outside) to over 150.

I mean, really, this was a celebration and solemnization of my love for another person, not a dog and pony show.
posted by Samizdata at 7:49 PM on June 9, 2017 [4 favorites]


Also, there was zero livestock at the event, so at least there's that.
posted by Samizdata at 7:49 PM on June 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


Yeah, when our parents started talking about helicopters and 300 people we didn't know, at a venue where none of our friends would feel welcome, and we were in our 30s, and expected to pay for it ourselves, we grabbed our best friends, their significant others, and high tailed it to vegas. We got married at the Belagio, but wandered around in the dress until i found an Elvis, snapped a pic, emailed it to my mom and told her we got married in an Elvis drive thru. Didn't show her real pics for months.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 7:55 PM on June 9, 2017 [41 favorites]


I highly approve of your wedding, SecretAgentSockpuppet. We did something very similar.

I was married in an Elvis chapel. We picked "Blue Hawaii" as our theme. Had a couple of dozen friends and family with us. The bride was in a traditional dress and very tall white go-go boots. I was in something vaguely gothic, and very tall Bowie-esque platform boots. Everyone else wore whatever they wanted. The ceremony was appropriately brief, with 3 or 4 songs. Culminating with all of us dancing with Elvis and the hulu girls in grass skirts. Rocking out to "Viva Las Vegas". And afterwards, we got to say "I do" a second time because Elvis wasn't ordained. Took the vows again backstage with a very sweet UU minister. So, I guess it was a Unitarian wedding in all the right ways.

Mom was a little horrified but a good sport. Everyone else had a blast. Went up and down the strip in a drunken haze afterwards, but the dress somehow stayed intact.
posted by honestcoyote at 8:10 PM on June 9, 2017 [13 favorites]


"Mom was a little horrified but a good sport."

Can confirm, that was properly Unitarian.
posted by traveler_ at 8:50 PM on June 9, 2017 [14 favorites]


Billionaires gonna billion.
posted by vorpal bunny at 8:57 PM on June 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


Article didn't touch on it...but what do you give a fifth-generation Rockefeller as a wedding gift?
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:13 PM on June 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'd love to be stinking rich.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:25 PM on June 9, 2017


Article didn't touch on it...but what do you give a fifth-generation Rockefeller as a wedding gift?

Galapagos
posted by Itaxpica at 10:29 PM on June 9, 2017 [6 favorites]


Vacation or an island?
posted by jacquilynne at 11:11 PM on June 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


She saw her clients and their peers demonized during the recession. She thought it was unfair, myopic. “Most of my clients, yes, are very rich. They are also the people that, you walk into a hospital, you see their names on all the wings. It's not like they were like, ‘I'm going to have this wedding, so everyone can die. I don't care.’ They're doing both.”
Is it ungenerous of me to wish all of these people just one brief interior moment like the end of Schindler's List where their brain starts equating the cost of dresses and pop-star performances to medical procedures for the working poor or meals for schoolkids?
posted by Etrigan at 3:36 AM on June 10, 2017 [11 favorites]


One of our good bar customers was the chaplain at the nearby state hospital. He refused any fee for marrying us so we paid off his long-running bar tab instead. The pikers in the article are getting off cheap...
posted by jim in austin at 4:51 AM on June 10, 2017 [6 favorites]


Good, redistribute at least a little of that wealth to planners, construction workers, caterers, venues, pop stars' coke dealers, etc. better than it sitting in a bank account gathering interest or being used to overthrow a government somewhere.

I just had my 150 person(!) wedding two weeks ago and the two things I learned were that I never want to do that again and if I did, to get a planner next time. And this was a low key thing in an art gallery where the catering was primarily a couple of roast pigs carved to order and the cake was some tres leches delivered from a local Mexican bakery. The basic requirement we had was that the food didn't suck. And it did not. And as a bonus I have a pig head in my freezer.

I couldn't imagine the sort of coordination that goes on at this scale.
posted by mikesch at 6:54 AM on June 10, 2017 [4 favorites]


Most guests arrived on Thursday afternoon, and with the exception of those who owned houses nearby, stayed at Hôtel du Cap, where the couple had subsidized the rooms, the smallest of which run for around $600 a night on October weekends.

I love "with the exception of those who owned houses nearby"! Fun article (if you can keep your gorge from rising too vigorously); thanks for posting it.
posted by languagehat at 7:18 AM on June 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


It's fascinating to see how extreme money gets spent, but also nauseating. Sure, they give to the hospital, but if there was economic equality, even if there was just a little less economic inequality, the hospital wing would still be paid for by the community, one way or another. Would starving children be fed if the flowers were a little less extravagant, or if you had just Elton John, instead of Elton John and Mariah Carey? The system that allows for the accumulation of extreme wealth also keeps people in extreme poverty. yeah, I'm a spoilsport
posted by theora55 at 8:02 AM on June 10, 2017 [9 favorites]


> Vacation or an island?

If one has to ask...
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:46 PM on June 10, 2017 [2 favorites]


As the future (now ex-missus) and I had lived together for a while before marriage, our registry was mainly full of "one of those would be nice" things like a bread machine and such. We tried rather hard to come up with a range of gift costs for various parties invited.

Oh, and I had a clownfish pillow.

Which we got.

(Oh, forgot, my other contribution was writing a database app to print appropriate address labels based on the data entry the missus had done with a terrible off the shelf planner program.)
posted by Samizdata at 12:48 PM on June 10, 2017


I performed a very sweet wedding last night for two men. One from Fiji and one from the US. There were about 90 people, some of whom flew in from Singapore, Fiji and Hawaii on short notice since visas are expiring and weddings needed to be had on the ASAP. It was in their front yard, it was beautiful and touching and I'm guessing it wasn't any less fun than a 300 million dollar affair.
posted by Sophie1 at 3:50 PM on June 10, 2017 [6 favorites]


Even as I speak, the hotel I work at is bought out for a destination wedding. The whole hotel (though maybe a third of rooms are empty), both restaurants. All the guests seem reasonable, lovely people but the scuttlebutt is the whole shebang is costing a half million, which seems extravagant.
posted by vrakatar at 5:31 PM on June 10, 2017


I was married in an Elvis chapel. We picked "Blue Hawaii" as our theme. Had a couple of dozen friends and family with us. The bride was in a traditional dress and very tall white go-go boots. I was in something vaguely gothic, and very tall Bowie-esque platform boots. Everyone else wore whatever they wanted.

Now that Elvis Presley's popularity is plummeting, with record collectors no longer paying high prices for his records, I wonder whether Elvis impersonators and the stereotypical Vegas Elvis wedding have a future. If not, what will replace him?
posted by acb at 6:04 PM on June 10, 2017 [1 favorite]


I wonder whether Elvis impersonators and the stereotypical Vegas Elvis wedding have a future.

I forget which comedian once pointed out (long ago) that Elvis impersonators don't really look like Elvis, but they all look like each other. Elvis impersonators have never been about Elvis, just like dudes with big eagle decals on their pickup trucks aren't fans of ornithology. The value of kitsch is independent of the value of the underlying act.
posted by Etrigan at 6:18 PM on June 10, 2017 [4 favorites]


So perhaps, in 100 years' time, there will still be “Elvises”, but they'll be a quasi-priestly caste of wedding celebrants and performers. They'll wear a variant of the Elvis costume (rhinestone jumpsuit, quiff-shaped headpiece, triangular collar), possibly with some mutations not yet seen. Outside of weddings, what form will their performance take? Will it broaden beyond Presley's songs into some kind of variety act? Will it become stylised like a sort of kabuki theatre? Will they appeal to contemporary tastes by covering the popular songs of the day (Elvis-ised, of course, for whatever that means), or alternately serve not as popular entertainment but as a sort of ritual performance?
posted by acb at 6:31 PM on June 10, 2017 [5 favorites]


So perhaps, in 100 years' time, there will still be “Elvises”, but they'll be a quasi-priestly caste of wedding celebrants and performers. They'll wear a variant of the Elvis costume (rhinestone jumpsuit, quiff-shaped headpiece, triangular collar), possibly with some mutations not yet seen. Outside of weddings, what form will their performance take? Will it broaden beyond Presley's songs into some kind of variety act? Will it become stylised like a sort of kabuki theatre? Will they appeal to contemporary tastes by covering the popular songs of the day (Elvis-ised, of course, for whatever that means), or alternately serve not as popular entertainment but as a sort of ritual performance?

For the longest time, I have called Elvis lovers "The Elvi". Thanks for a brilliant picture of the future of the Elvi.
posted by Samizdata at 9:43 AM on June 11, 2017


I wonder whether Elvis impersonators and the stereotypical Vegas Elvis wedding have a future

So perhaps, in 100 years' time, there will still be “Elvises”

I really like your vision of Elvis's future. Your earlier post also made me think about "what does Elvis mean to me / my generation?", which is possibly the strangest derail ever in a thread ostensibly about weddings.

My wedding was 17 years ago. Everyone involved, except for the parents, was late twenties to early thirties Gen X. I was barely old enough to remember Elvis's death but otherwise had no firsthand contact with his music. Everyone else in my group was the same. Elvis was kitsch. Elvis was the nostalgic kitsch of an older Vegas, which was already starting to disappear in 2000. For my age group who were in certain cultures / subcultures in the 80s and 90s, Elvis permeated a lot of it. "Ironic" kitsch because we felt like we couldn't sincerely enjoy kitsch for itself, and genuine affection as well. He was there in spirit in things like the Church of the Subgenius, B-52s. Mythologized frequently in the Weekly World News, and occasionally in some of the sci-fi of the time. And brought to the surface with songs like "Elvis is Everywhere" and the really nice explosion of great rockabilly bands in the 80s. Elvis's music, cheesiness, and sad stories, flavored too many 80s and 90s things to mention.

Celebrating a wedding with Elvis for my small part of my age group was basically celebrating the culture of our youth. One where Elvis wasn't exactly dominant in his own sake, but his ghost and cultural echoes provided a golden thread running through all of it. I hadn't thought of this before until your prompting, so thanks for that.

As much as I love your vision of the future of Elvis, I'm not sure it will happen. Elvis seems invisible to people under 30. Doesn't even exist much as cheese. Which is sad because, when I was young, I somehow assumed the ghost of Elvis, and his mythology and his high priests as impersonators, would last forever.
posted by honestcoyote at 3:21 PM on June 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


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