Eat (like) the rich: from Walmart Birkins to Meghan

The wealth obsession

Meghan in a fancy rented kitchen. Her own one is probably bigger!

You know you think the year will start off slow, and then Meghan comes along with a hokey advert for her plush new Netflix cooking show. Who’s excited to watch Mrs Montecito embark on her showboating trad-wifery?

What I wonder is whether she’s missed the vibe shift or is the siren of a new one. The cream-y stealth wealth-y wardrobe feels a little Gwyneth court-saga which was so long ago (almost two years) that someone’s made a musical about it already.

In her trailer voiceover she proclaims that “We’re not in the pursuit of perfection we’re in the pursuit of joy” while of course shucking off a blob of honey from her beehive with perfectly waved hair and pristine makeup. Her skill, she reminds us, is, “Taking something pretty ordinary and elevating it” which should frankly be the entire Windsor family’s new motto.

The saccharine honey coloured whoops of joy and positivity chime with the earnest mores of the trad wives, but even Hannah Neeleman posts after-birth videos featuring her bloody placenta; Paltrow - whose Goop empire has taken a crumble this year with three rounds of redundancies - is busy posting sweaty sauna, makeup-free pictures. Martha Stewart is swearing and hanging out with Snoop Dogg. The au courant homemaker lifestyle gurus flirt with a little warts and all authenticity that I’m not sure the Duchess will be offering. That idea of perfect curation of Instagram tiles is more mid-00s than now, where chaos and mess are projected however curated that may also be.

And yet, the emergence of the new ultra-perfect faces (Anita Bhagwandas wrote brilliantly on this in The Powder Room) and assumption that rich people will grab the moral high ground of thinness now they can all afford to shoot up Ozempic and overload of “aesthetic” curation of everything from fridges to front halls does point to a hardening of projected perfectionism again. So maybe Meghan is on point.

Her schtick is, of course, set to be a commodity, she’ll aim to charm by picking out fresh vegetables from an extravagant garden, baking bread and icing doughnuts with fresh flowers while a little later selling us bouji-jam from her soon to launch American Riviera Orchard brand.

Like flicking through an issue of Architectural Digest, my biggest overriding thought is, “It must be nice to be so rich.” Because the porn here is wealth - the massive house, the luxury of time to fanny around picking out fresh kale from the dirt, the on-call hair and makeup, studiously creating elaborate flower arrangements, filming in warm sun-drenched light for the miserable peasants back in Albion.

What Meghan’s show really chimes with is our obsession with rich people, even ones that are demonstrably awful. Meghan and Harry, clearly their own two biggest fans, seem to know this, too. This content segue is tapping into the cultural vogue for the highly monied (see the new politico power duo Trump & Musk).

The Sussexes flop Polo documentary attempted to shine a light on it too, yet overshot - too niche, and the cast were too painful to inspire or even satirise or as Meghan offers, “incorporate these practices everyday.” The trick to selling rich is to make it feel like anyone can live like this if you just bake hard enough.

But watch the endless TikToks eulogising beige Shein loungewear which “looks so expensive”, see the latest viral vomit of the Walmart Birkin (“Wirkin”) knock off. To appear rich is to transmit success to the world; to look poor is failure. Dupe culture is thriving because we’re desperate to buy the illusion of wealth, ideally as cheaply as possible. All while we’re spinning out attempting to pay for the ever increasing mundanity and drudgery of real life, we watch on as the billionaires get even richer from selling us back their lifestyles.

Let them eat Meghan’s cake! Plus VAT.

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XVX