Once upon a time, you could spot wealth from across the room. The shoes were Church’s, the jackets discreetly Savile Row, and the faces, well, let’s just say they’d met La Prairie in meaningful quantities.
It was a sort of international uniform. You could land in Dubai, Milan or Singapore and pick them out as easily as one spots the drunk uncle at a wedding.
But now? Now it’s a mess. A man in Church’s loafers could be the head of a hedge fund or the head gardener, depending which side of the Adriatic you happen to be on.
Linen in Paris whispers “old family in Cap Ferrat”, in Los Angeles it’s “screenwriter between projects”, and in Surrey it’s “just enrolled in a sailing course so I can remind everyone I own a boat”.
It’s not that the rich have got poorer. They’ve just got bored of being obvious. The whole ‘global taste’ thing has gone.
We’ve entered the era of hyper-local codes, where what counts as sophisticated in Madrid would get you mistaken for a provincial dentist in Seoul.
In Rome, an heiress wears jewellery from an atelier so obscure it doesn’t even have a phone number. In Tokyo, collectors will drop a fortune on a whisky label no European has ever heard of.
None of it is designed for you to understand. That’s entirely the point.
Of course, the brands are in a flap. For decades they could roll out the same beige leather goods and call it timeless. Now they need to speak in fifty different dialects of taste, and heaven help them if they get the accent wrong.
The rich still signal wealth, they’ve just stopped signalling it publicaly.
And so, every summer in Portofino, you’ll see them, men in scuffed Church’s, women in something airy and unlabelled, gliding past the yachts while the tourists wonder why the gardeners are allowed on the pier.
The joke, as ever, is on the people still trying to spot the rich. The rich already know exactly who each other are.