Glitter Without Grace: When the Rich Prove That Money Can’t Buy Taste

 

        (Subtitle: A Peckerwood Exposé on Wealth Without Taste, Compassion, or Limits)

It’s a bizarre, jarring time to be an American. Rent eats up half your paycheck, groceries are now priced like luxury imports, and the most popular mental health tip is, "Have you tried drinking water and pretending everything is fine?" Meanwhile, the ultra-rich are toasting themselves with vintage champagne poured by endangered-animal-themed waitstaff on yachts larger than military destroyers.

It’s not just that the wealthy have money. It’s that they wield it like toddlers with glitter glue and a God complex.

Take Jeff Bezos, former humble bookseller turned space-obsessed baron of ostentation. His $500 million mega-yacht, Koru, floats through the Mediterranean with the self-importance of a new religion. A secondary support yacht tags along, naturally. It has a helipad, because what’s a floating palace without floating air traffic control? Inside? Glass-bottom pools, leather-wrapped everything, and decor that screams "Neptune's man cave, but make it Amazon Prime."

Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, a woman whose Botox has allegedly achieved sentience, hosted their engagement aboard this spectacle alongside Oprah, DiCaprio, and The Koven—an unholy trinity of relevance, wealth, and narcissism. And if that weren’t enough, they threw Sánchez’s teenage son a yacht foam party that reportedly cost more than your town’s annual school budget. Incidentally, they ended up paying millions to clean up the mess. Though not before the paps got the shots of them frolicking like it was 1997 at a eurotrash disco in Mykonos. 

 

Lauren’s face is a case study in modern excess: immobile, inflated, and vaguely feline. The kind of work that doesn’t whisper “refined” but rather shouts “sponsored by a scalpel.” The rich don’t age anymore—they morph. Someone had to grab the Wildenstein crown after Jocelyn's demise. Lauren wants everything and this seemingly includes questionable plastic surgery, even though her new husband is a gazillionaire. 

Then there are the weddings, which now resemble sci-fi conventions for the financially unhinged. Remember the Swarovski heiress who wore a literal crystal-encrusted wedding gown weighing 100 pounds or the oligarch's granddaughter flanked by a performance from Mariah Carey and Elton John like it was a Vegas residency in honor of bad taste? The bride, all of 19, reportedly staged the $100 million affair just to make her ex jealous—and promptly divorced her new husband to go back to said ex. Romantic.

 

Somewhere, etiquette books from the Gilded Age are self-immolating. Where is our Edith Wharton 2025? Most likely in Turkey getting impossibly white, ridiculous veneers and an outsize boob job while doing a video diary encouraging us to follow along her "healing journey." Like and Subscribe! I need to monetize this bitch. 

Today’s nouveau riche don’t aspire to grace. They aspire to attention. Their look? Logos-on-logos-on-logomania. Think Balenciaga Crocs, rhinestone thongs, and $40,000 handbags made of PVC and tears. "Old money" would sooner die than post an unboxing video. They knew better. They wore Loro Piana, not Louis Vuitton neon. Their estates were quiet, their philanthropy discreet, their wealth almost boring by design.

This generation? They slap a Givenchy tag on their dog’s collar and call it Tuesday. Dr. Marla Singh, psychologist specializing in performative wealth, observes: “What we’re seeing isn’t confidence. It’s desperation in designer drag. There’s a pathological need to be seen, even if what’s being seen is a spiritual void wrapped in cashmere.”

And then there’s Elon Musk, The Space Cadet in Chief. The Iron Man illusion has worn off, leaving us with a man tweeting through his midlife crisis while publicly dismantling Twitter like a Jenga tower built by narcissism. He’s launching rockets while Americans ration heart medication. He’s babbling about Mars while hospitals shut down in Alabama. Colonizing another planet isn’t noble—it’s cowardice gilded in tech-speak. Dr. Gabriel Cortez, economist and cultural theorist, calls it “plutocratic escapism”: a fantasy where the ultra-rich flee the problems they helped create, then expect applause for it.

 

Welcome to the trickle-down circus of curated delusion—where a 23-year-old with a BBL and a trust fund offers “healing wisdom” from a rooftop pool in Tulum. Where micro-influencers in $2,000 Jacquemus set stage-fake airport shots for brand deals they didn’t book. And where private jet backdrops are rented by the hour for content—because who needs honesty when you have a Lightroom preset? If the billionaires are the emperors, then influencers are their jesters—paid to juggle privilege and fantasy for public consumption. 

Skywriting gender reveals. Sponsored nose jobs. Wellness retreats hosted by people who have never read a book not titled The Secret. The influencer economy doesn’t merely lack self-awareness—it monetizes its absence.  

Influencers like Emma Chamberlain and the D’Amelio sisters don’t just sell products; they sell an identity built on inaccessible aesthetics and filters so thick they could legally be considered fiction. Dr. Marla Singh, a psychologist who studies digital narcissism, puts it bluntly:

“This isn’t confidence. It’s curated dissociation. The influencer economy is a house of mirrors—reflecting nothing real back to anyone, least of all the influencers themselves.”

These aren't tastemakers. They're illusionists. Wealth cosplay in a ring light—aspirational only if your aspiration is to live in a vapid GIF loop of performative luxury.

While Americans max out credit cards to buy groceries, we still gasp in admiration at $2 million closets and TikTok tours of mansions shaped like shoes. We repost, retweet, and double-tap their delusions like Pavlovian disciples. Dr. Cortez again: “We’ve been trained to see visibility as virtue. The loudest, most garish displays of wealth are framed as success—not symptoms.” 

And no carnival of vulgarity is complete without the Orange Menace Crew—America’s first family of aesthetic malpractice. Their fondness for gold fixtures, mirror walls, and rococo ceilings has less in common with Versailles and more with a Miami pawn shop run by Liberace’s ghost.

There is no shame, no sense of occasion. Just excess. Just a hunger to be noticed, regardless of the cost or consequence.

The Real Question:Why do we let the emotionally bankrupt define what success looks like?There was a time when wealth whispered. Today it screams.

And so here we are—watching billionaires play make-believe with the planet’s resources while Americans search for dental care on Craigslist. Taste is dead, elegance is buried, and dignity is somewhere crying in a clearance bin.

But maybe, just maybe, we’re ready to stop clapping.

 Coming Up in the Series:

• Baroque on a Budget: The Rise of Haute Delusion in Everyday America

• Girlbossed into Bankruptcy: How Financial FOMO Took Down a Generation

 Quotes Worth Tattooing:

“Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.” — Anaïs Nin
“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” — Epictetus
“Money has never made man happy, nor will it.” — Benjamin Franklin