Help, I’m addicted to wealth porn
From Amazon Prime’s ‘Expats’ to five-star refrigerators, loads of money never looked so seductive
“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” So opens Virginia Woolf’s landmark novel. Written nearly 100 years ago, the first sentence of Mrs Dalloway both upends the literary canon with its bold new modernist interventions and conveys exquisitely, in just nine words, the shiver of entitlement that afflicts the entertaining upper class.
Mrs Dalloway was written during a period of relative prosperity after the first world war: a world still peopled by cooks and maids, and coal-delivery men and butchers who made house calls every week. But despite offering a study of the post-Victorian English propriety of a forgotten age, it was the first thing I thought of when settling down to binge-watch Expatson Amazon Prime last weekend.
An adaptation of The Expatriates, a 2016 novel by Janice YK Lee, Expats focuses on a trio of women grappling with privilege and personal tragedy in Hong Kong, all set against the backdrop of 2014’s Umbrella Revolution.
Nicole Kidman stars, as she so often does these days, as an etiolated martyr of anhedonia; a landscape gardener who has paused her career to allow her partner’s to thrive. We find the family at a terrible fracture point following the disappearance of their two-year-old, and the drama follows the entwined narratives of the three women connected by the disappearance of the child.
The drama has been largely panned by critics, but what do they know of what we want to see? For those fans of wealth porn who watch television only for the real estate and wardrobes, Expats is a promiscuous treat.
The real appeal of Expats is not Nicole and her ever-evolving upper lip but in all the delicious details that characterise expat life. Hong Kong offers a lifestyle that seems to characterise another time. Phalanxes of staff wordlessly launder clothing; drivers chaperone their charges; chefs are conjured to cater for dinner parties at which they magic up flaming meringue desserts; and women swathed in pale silks and studded stilettos visit flower markets, like our friend Clarissa Dalloway, gathering extravagant bouquets. Woolf nailed wealth way back in 1925: few things offer a more useful shorthand for extreme privilege than floristry displays.
I can’t resist a yarn about the super-rich. And there’s an abundance to be devoured. Recent TV shows have taken us into the lives of media moguls (Succession), peered through the plate-glass penthouse windows of the television classes (The Morning Show) and toured the world with the ultra-high net-worth individuals of The White Lotus hotels. Just Like That, the spin-off of Sex and the City, puts us in the Manolos of the menopausals of Manhattan, while Curb Your Enthusiasm, now in its 12th and final season, has long made comedy of the exceptional distractions that trouble the multi-millionaire bubble inhabited by Larry David and his golfing buddies in Hollywood.
The vast majority of these dramas tell the stories of Americans, a nation whom others typically belittle for their cultural poverty while coveting their two-door fridges and turbo-powered washing machines. These TV shows are also a reminder that the average American is now around 30 per cent wealthier than the average Briton, a gap that has widened massively in the past two decades.
I have always had a weakness for rich details in my cultural diet. Macaulay Culkin’s house in Home Aloneremains the gold standard of aspiration as far as I’m concerned: a palatial gaff in the Chicago suburbs with what seems to be about a dozen bedrooms and a massive basement laundry.
One might have thought that I, in my role as editor of HTSI, a magazine dedicated to the peccadilloes of the super-wealthy, would be sated with insights into their lifestyles. Instead, the job has only burnished my fascination with how they spend their dough. Perhaps it’s because social media has given rise to a rich new seam of super-wealthy super-facts: X means we can track their private planes as they bounce between Baku, Monaco and the Maldives; TikTok invites us to share their first-class cabin experiences on prestige airlines, or watch them restock their larders, or peruse their beauty shelves.
Social media has swept away the mystery of what it means to be absurdly rich and shoved it in our faces. Wealth enablers will let you watch them preparing meals for tens of families holidaying in the Hamptons or arranging $100,000 weekend getaways for their well-heeled clients. It’s wealth porn, and I’m addicted to it — largely because, in my experience, most rich people have appalling taste. Give a man a million pounds and he will inevitably slab his kitchen in ugly marble islands, create some monolithic hallway in onyx or, worse, gold-plate it, and build a ghastly man-cave to house his ugly tech.
The super-wealthy tend to lean to the generic: they all buy the same Togo sofa by Ligne Roset and the same old spots or butterflies by Damien Hirst. Even the lovelies of Expats seem to have an issue with ill-fitting trousers and silk tracksuit bottoms that expose their VPLs.
It’s a genuine thrill, therefore, when someone with stacks of money decides to fill their house with Francis Bacons or, like Jacob Rothschild — who died this week at 87 — put world-beating installations on their land. Rothschild was that rare species, someone who was rich as Croesus who also had impeccable good taste. Nice flowers too.
Email Jo at jo.ellison@ft.com
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen