Celebrity wedding madness

Apparently, "everyone" loves a wedding. Well, I love it when people I care about are happy, so if by extension that means I love a wedding, then so be it.

What I do find to be an interesting phenomenon is the love of celebrity weddings. Yes, you get some cool ideas, yes you get to see some beautiful gowns etc, but what else does it provide? A chance to mock and jeer those who have the hide to have waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more money than us, of course. Because, money does not necessarily buy good taste and celebrities can prove this better than anyone we know. This explains the success of trashy magazines such as NW, OK!, NoIdea and so on. Even those of us who hate such tripe have succumbed now and then - even if we are not proud of the fact.

Last weekend I had the (mis)fortune to view a television show called Most Expensive Celebrity Weddings (I have since discovered that it was based on the list compiled by Forbes.) Normally I wouldn't watch it. I wouldn't even have the tele on at that time of day. But I was talking to TAMS on the phone. She is a lover of trashy tv from way back. And, since she lives in a reality where daylight saving is the norm, she had already seen it. So with (admittedly very little) encouragement from her, I switched it on and was watching it while we were talking. (This tends to be a normal state of affairs with the two of us. I refuse to watch The Logies but a few years ago was coerced into watching it while talking to her on the phone. I ended up watching the red carpet walk. So, so wrong.)

Aaaaaanyway, the higher up the expense ladder we got, the more likely that hideousness was on display. Granted, not all of the weddings were in poor taste, some of them appeared to be quite nice. The expense was stupefying with all of them though.

The number one spot was taken by Liza Minnelli and David Gest. $3.5 million (est). Insane. Particularly since they got divorced the following year. Actually according to the Forbes article, 40% of the people on the list have since divorced. Minnelli and Gest deserve special mention though - for their wedding cake. A 12-tiered affair, it was 7 feet tall and from the pics they showed, not at all attractive. Try as I might, I've not been able to find a picture on the web.

I did, however, find a picture of Christina Aguilera's dress ($2 million, #6). Designed by Christian LaCroix, apparently. Doesn't change the fact that it is impressive, and not in a good way:


I found the pic on this blog devoted to celebrity weddings. I've only looked at the first page of it, but have found the link to the InStyle Weddings site (including 10 Tips from a Celebrity Planner; 25 Great Cakes), and the homepage of Forbes, which is how I found out the original list was compiled by them.

Finally, in my quest to find the pic of the Minnelli-Gest cake, I found this:

But even the Minelli-Gest (sic) affair pales in comparison to the most expensive wedding in recent years. In 2004, the Indian billionaire and steel king Lakshmi Mittal hosted a 5-day mother-of-all-weddings at chateaus and hotspots across Europe for his 23-year old daughter and 1,200 guests. The invitation, encased in silver, ran 20-pages, and the final bill came to around 70 million dollars.

source.