Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz
In 1971 rock singer Janis Joplin in her album Pearl prayed the Lord, probably thinking of the Holidays season, to buy her a Mercedes Benz.
The song at the time was meant to convey the message that owning a luxury automobile does not make you a better person, she surely was not alluding of the charming diamond covered Mercedes SL class spotted on display at the Millionaires Fair in Moscow this week. It is not sure, if the diamonds are real, but, it looks really dazzling.Vendors swished into Moscow this past weekend, setting up elaborate booths offering a range of high-priced products, from jets and yachts to private islands and more familiar luxury goods.They were angling for a glance or hint of interest from Russia’s oil barons, captains of industry and others whose origins of wealth are unclear.
Among them was Michael Morren, a dapper Swiss executive in a pin-striped suit, who was selling high-end cellphones for the GoldVish brand of Geneva. GoldVish handsets typically go for $18,000 to $150,000, somewhat higher than models from Nokia or Moscow. For the crowd at Moscow’s second annual Millionaire Fair, however, even GoldVish’s usual prices didn’t seem entirely appropriate.The price for Mr. Morren’s diamond-studded cellphone? A mere $1.27 million.
Five years into an oil boom, Moscow is becoming one of the hottest markets for luxury goods. Already, it counts 25 billionaires, along with a healthy number of Russia’s total of 88,000 millionaires.The GoldVish cellphone, for example, glitters with 120 carats of diamonds, encrusting a case of white gold. And if the sparkle alone did not draw in customers, Mr. Morren hired a blonde model to hold up a plaque declaring: “Certificate of the most expensive mobile phone.” Nobody was challenging that claim.“Somebody is wearing a nice watch and nice jewelry,” explained Mr. Morren, the president of GoldVish.
“And then the phone rings. It doesn’t match. It’s a piece of plastic. We make it match. ”Though a good deal of the oil money is trickling down to ordinary people, the elite class of Russian rich are definitely growing richer, according to Peter Westin, the chief economist at MDM Bank, a Russian bank in Moscow. He says that the gap between rich and poor is widening in Russia, though it is still not as extreme as in the United States, according to a statistical measure by the World Bank.
Perhaps that’s because poverty is shrinking here and there are still fewer rich people than in America. But they are trying to make up for lost time.“Russians always loved luxury but lived in poverty,” said Olga V. Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist studying the Russian elite. And with each passing year of soaring commodity prices, very rich Russians are taking on more of the swagger and style of Arabian oil sheiks, as well as their spendthrift habits. Andrei Melnichenko, then a 33-year-old banker, married a Serbian model near Cannes in a ceremony that cost $40 million in September last year.
It was the social event of the year for Russian oligarchs; for the nuptials, the couple dismantled an Orthodox church in Russia and re-assembled it in France. There are rich people. And then there are the Russian rich. “A lot of rich people here don’t say how they earn their money,” said Karsten Jacob, a salesman for Bugatti sports cars at the fair. “They wear sports shoes and training suits, and they walk up to our 1.3 million euro car and say, ‘Where can I buy it?’ ”Mr. Jacob was standing beside a $1.65 million Bugatti Veyron sports car that was hand-made in France. Its top speed is 253 miles per hour.
Over the weekend, the display model was sold to an anonymous Russian buyer, who paid full price.“Spend while you can” is a motto that has come to shape behavior, given the sometimes short-lived prominence of entrepreneurs, business tycoons and other moneyed players in Russia’s pell-mell business environment. Saving money in a bank might also be seen as foolhardy, for banking crises have occurred frequently. “It doesn’t do any good to put it in a bank,” Mr. Nikishin said. “We have the bitter experience.”
The Millionaire Fair, a traveling exhibit begun in the Netherlands in 2002, has had its greatest success in Moscow. At the fair’s other venues, in Amsterdam, Cannes, Shanghai and Kortrijk, Belgium, people came more to gawk. Russians came here to buy. Last year in Moscow, vendors did $600 million worth of business, selling gilded computer mice, curvy sports cars, Caribbean yacht charters and villas off the coast of Dubai, said Natalya A. Zadvornaya, the spokeswoman for the fair. By comparison, the show in Amsterdam this year rang up sales of $300 million. The Moscow fair is gaining attention. In 2005, 25,000 people showed up. This year, Ms. Zadvornaya said, 40,000 stopped by the cavernous exhibition space. Not surprisingly, there was more than a touch of gaudiness.
At one booth, a company hawked villas on an island off Panama. The island was once owned by John Wayne, and to give sales a boost, the display included a model wearing only body paint, in the image of a cowboy outfitted with bandana, vest, cartridge belt and revolvers. Elsewhere, a jeweler sold a gold-plated pacifier. GoldVish, the bejeweled phone maker, sold 15 handsets, though not the $1.27 million phone. Diamonds and gold aside, the phone is quite functional: it comes with Bluetooth, a camera, MP3 player and text messaging. The charger is included, too — gold-plated, of course.
In the ’90s, Fair Joplin’s step-sister owned the rights to the song and allowed Mercedes to use the song in commercials for their cars for the 50th aniversary . It was one of the great misappropriations of a song.
Janis Joplin never got a Mercedes Benz, but she did have a 1965 Porsche that was painted to become a piece of hippie art.
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Sources: ” New Czars of Conspicuous Consumption ” By Andrew E. Kramer, New York TimesPublished: November 1, 2006
The Video: Oh Lord won’t You Buy me a Mercedes BenzThe cd: Pearl available at Amazon
The 12 most Expensive collectibles for the holiday season of 2007 : See Gallery below!
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