By Emma Jacobs
Published: December 2 2010 18:07 | Last updated: December 2 2010 18:07
When Sir Philip Green, the British retail mogul, held a party five years ago for his son’s bar mitzvah, the details of the lavish affair provided meaty fare for the newspapers.
The billionaire, who this year was brought in to investigate governmental waste, reportedly flew 300 guests to the Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat in the south of France, at a rumoured cost of £4m ($6.4m); the entertainment was provided by Andrea Bocelli, the Italian tenor, and by R&B megastar Beyoncé.
Sir Philip’s was not the only child whose extravagant coming-of-age celebrations made the headlines that year. David Brooks, the US body-armour tycoon, who was recently convicted of stock fraud, hired the rock band Aerosmith and the rapper 50 Cent to perform at his daughter’s $10m bat mitzvah celebrations.
Lacey Myers, daughter of Marty Myers, the chief executive of Pet Brands, the pet accessory wholesaler, appeared on MTV’s My Super Sweet 16 wearing a $5,200 dress, arriving at her party of 300 guests on the back of an elephant. While the mega-wealthy set the bar high for lavish parties, their desire to create a spectacular day (or three in Sir Philip’s case) is not unusual among parents.
Sarah Balfour is the director of London-based Orchid Events, and organises parties for anything from £50k to £200k. She says: “Parents strive to find something different and new. More than the budget, parents are very conscious of having an original party, rather than a repeat of something they have already seen.”
Standard features apparently include chocolate fountains, ice-cream carts, dancers and magicians; in locations such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, Madame Tussauds, five-star hotels such as Claridge’s and private members’ clubs. Balfour pulls out all the stops to come up with original twists, such as hiring an eight-foot performing robot that recently appeared on stage with pop star Rihanna.
Wealthy parents are putting on ever more extravagant birthday bashes. One event planner tells of a pirate-themed party he staged recently for 30 eight-year-olds; set on a former Royal Navy warship moored on the Thames, it set the parents back £18,000.
Vanessa Story is co-founder and co-director of Kasimira, which organises bespoke children’s parties. She says £20,000 is not an unusual price tag for a birthday bash for a child under 10 years old.
She adds that the biggest cost is usually decorations – for example, recreating the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, “which is essentially recreating a film set”. She has also been asked to arrange a Shakespeare-themed party for five-year-olds (“I did warn the parents that they wouldn’t enjoy it”) and to buy personalised iPods or Nintendo DS games as “going home” presents.
Katie Burnett is unfazed by such requests. The director of Les Enfants, another children’s events organisation, has had clients with a £100k budget for a christening, and others who spent £20,000 on a first birthday. She is currently negotiating the hire of Stamford Bridge, the home of London’s Chelsea football team, for a football-mad nine-year-old (yours for £30,000, as it happens, but you’re not allowed on to the pitch).
And not so long ago, she had £40,000 to spend on a 12-year-old girl’s Madonna-themed party – she found a venue in Kensington, had a stage built and hired a choreographer to teach the girls how to do a dance routine, which they then performed. Alongside the dancing was a makeover bar and the obligatory chocolate fountain. Going-home bags included a DVD of the dance performance and a mocked-up copy of the celebrity magazine OK! full of photographs and stories from the party.
The recession has not dented spending on big bashes, according to Burnett. Increasing numbers of Russians are shoring up her revenues. “We find ourselves emailing the PAs in Moscow rather than the parents,” she says. In fact, her turnover has doubled over the past year.
She believes the growth in her revenues is due to the super-rich being relatively immune to the economic downturn, and because parents have become increasingly busy. “There are more people asking for our help last-minute, so the pressure is intense. We need to organise everything in a week.”
Story has observed that, while the recession has not left a dent in parents’ budgets, it has made some a little more discreet in their spending. “Clients spend a lot, but don’t necessarily want to show it. They don’t want to be seen as vulgar. There is a recent trend for children’s parties to go back to basics, with activities such as craft-making. Many parents are acutely aware of the social impact of setting the benchmark too high.”
David Trumper, manager of Jane Asher Party Cakes, believes the reason for the extravagance is in part due to children’s increasing savviness. “Fifteen to 20 years ago, it used to be enough to make a Barbie doll cake for a girl and a football cake for a boy. Now there are characters we’ve never heard of that we have to research on the internet. Kids are much more sophisticated than they used to be. It’s not abnormal for them to be drinking juice from champagne glasses.”
His company has created cakes costing £1,200 for four- and five-year-olds. “You pay for the amount of work that goes into it, rather than the volume of cake. If it’s a detailed teddy bears’ picnic, it can take three days to make.”
William Doherty, professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota, says the competition over ever more lavish children’s parties is “like an arms race”. Three years ago, he started the Birthdays Without Pressure initiative with a group of parents, with the aim of highlighting the social and financial difficulties that excessive birthday celebrations can cause. “I became aware of the issue when my grandchild was six months old. My daughter said she felt pressure from people asking her what she planned for the first birthday. I went to a store to see how much there was available – there was a whole aisle devoted to first birthdays.”
He says this commercialisation makes birthdays very different events from his own childhood in the 1950s, “when people had a cake and maybe some friends”. He believes the transformation came in the 1980s. “It was a time of increased affluence, smaller families and a more child-centred culture. It became a time of overscheduling our children’s activities.”
He feels there is too much pressure on parents to “do something original, to have a new theme. It used to be that the party theme was just a birthday – how quaint that sounds now.”
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, believes that such parties are about the parents, not the children.
“Parties are an adult-to-adult negotiation; the children are incidental. It’s really about the parents’ values and lifestyle. They find it impossible to have any psychic distance between themselves and their children. In fact, kids want to be left alone and find their own way of having fun.”
Lavish occasions, says Prof Doherty, are “too much for little children – they get overstimulated. For the older ones, there is a sense of entitlement; as one father said to me, ‘It’s a birthday, not an annual coronation.’ The message is that the child is a little prince or princess and the centre of the universe.” Moreover, he says, such bashes have broader implications. “My concern is that when the bar goes up for the very rich, it goes up for the middle classes who can’t afford it. It trickles down.”
Jonathan Alpert, a Manhattan psychotherapist, also feels that making a statement through lavish parties sends the wrong message to a child. “Happiness and love are measured by how big or expensive,” he says. “Money doesn’t buy love, only pseudo-love. I see it a lot with Manhattanites, where material items are an expression of love, status and importance. For the child, grandeur might become the norm and be expected in the future. In a nutshell, it’s … a formula for breeding snobbery.”
Burnett disagrees with such views: “People take a very negative view of such lavish parties – they suggest the children are spoilt. But many of their parents are wealthy and very busy – these sums aren’t a lot of money. The girl whose father spent £40,000 on her party – he stayed for it and participated fully and really enjoyed it. At the end the daughter went round and thanked every member of the team.
“The important thing is how you bring your children up. As a parent, you get pleasure out of doing something lovely for your child. If you can afford it, then it’s up to you how you spend it.”
Story agrees: “In my experience, there is no correlation between the budget and the children’s behaviour. Some of the most lavish parties are for the best-behaved children.”