When the editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, got hitched last month, the guest list read like the contents page of his magazine — Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Tom Ford, Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, David Geffen, Ron Perelman and Anna Wintour. This wasn’t just a wedding, it was major-league networking nuptials — “net nups”, if you will — with satellite cocktail parties, power breakfasts, dinners and lunches being held at several grand hotels, offering further networking opportunities around the event.
It’s not merely Carter and his ambitious American media crowd who see the posh wedding as a huge business opportunity. Over the past couple of years, I have lost count of the times I have been unceremoniously edged out of a hot marquee conversation for my lack of financial muscle/political nous/deal-making latency. Is it polite to exchange business cards? I’ve seen it done in church, during the actual ceremony or while hymns are being sung — the beginnings of some big deal being hatched during the final chorus of Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer. I’ve even seen a BlackBerry produced from the pocket of the morning coat of someone in pew 18 as the couple knelt to take their vows.
How do you know that you are at a high-octane net nups? There will be lots of clues. Really serious mergers will require (at the very least) a three-day commitment. They will take place in a far-flung location, somewhere hot, picturesque, historic or, preferably, all three. They will never be held in July or August, when all the most powerful and influential people are on their annual vacations in Sardinia, St Tropez or Ibiza.
The net-nups invitation will resemble a small novel, and will incorporate maps, suggest congenial (ie, luxury) hotels and offer a list of local hairdressers who know how to blow-dry competently. Guests will seem to have been invited for their fame, prestige and/or business clout, rather than on some sappy and sentimental friendship rationale. Unsightly godparents are edged out in favour of the fabulous and photogenic, and some people on your table may even claim to have met the bride and groom only once or twice. The RSVP-ing may well be handled by a high-powered PR.
Advertisement
Although the pervading atmosphere will be relaxed, informal and languid, the dress code will be impossibly chic and somewhat competitive. Indeed, international competition, rather than, say, chummy, unified celebration, is key to a truly successful net nups. The white-tie, jet-set net nups of the City whizz Zoe Appleyard and the multimillionaire Escada heir Sven Ley at Salzburg Cathedral last year, for instance, was a sort of Jeux sans Frontières of global bankers, German and English aristos, City boys, Eurotrash and Park Avenue princesses, and involved a great deal of financial posturing. “The talk was all about what slot one had secured for one’s private plane on the way home,” said a guest. “I heard how one super-rich couple had been nudged off their slot at Northolt by an even richer couple and diverted to Luton. They were mortified.”
How did this happen? How did the wedding mutate into an orgy of morning-coated power-broking? Inevitably, with work dominating our lives and our careers defining our personalities, wedding-guest lists are drawn as much from one’s desktop Rolodex as they are from friends and family. It is now the norm to describe a wedding in terms of the potency of its guests: “Oh it was all media/showbiz/ hedge-fund analysts.”
Even the royal family isn’t immune to the habit. When Prince Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles earlier this year, the prince’s cousins Freddie Windsor and Lady Helen Taylor, and some of the prince’s oldest friends (including Nicky Haslam), were NFI, while Phil Collins, Joan Rivers, Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar got the necessary hard cards, presumably as a nod for their work for the Prince’s Trust. In the crazy world of net nups, the house of Kumar carries more authority than the House of Windsor.