Why the World of Luxury-Event Design Is More Outrageous Than Ever

Scores of launches, dinners, art events, and openings are filling up the end-of-year party season, but something’s changed. Hosts from Beverly Hills to Brickell Key are embracing an “experiential” approach, promising vivid encounters, multisensory adventures—and swag that guests have to wait around for because “it is being monogrammed.”

Call it “captive opulence,” and it is no accident. As fashion and luxury brands—from handbags to liquor to resorts to, arguably, even art—hustle to set themselves apart in an edgy economy, no one is wasting money on casual drop-ins.

Event planners want parties more elaborate and elongated “so the guests stick around, and they feel they have had an experience,” explains veteran party photographer Patrick McMullen, stationed by the Mark Hotel’s sterling-silver eggnog fountain on Saturday night in Manhattan. As he pivoted from snapping Susan Sarandon to Chris Noth to a scantily clad young Santa Claus at the launch party for Zurich Galerie Gmurzynska’s new Upper East Side outpost, he added: “It’s all so your party stands out.”

The entertaining trends were crystal clear at the just-concluded Art Basel Miami Beach fair and its dozens of concurrent events, a week considered something of a bellwether for high-end party planning. Events were designed to be more immersive when invited guests arrived (read: lush garden “rooms,” performance art, multispace installations), harder to crash by the uninvited—yachts don’t have side doors—and far less tempting or easy to leave. (The delayed swag! The giant selfie by artist JR! The flaming cocktails!) Altogether, these changes ostensibly sought to curtail the Louboutin lemmings moving from neighborhood to neighborhood who normally make the rounds at scrums like Miami Art Week, Sundance, and Cannes.

Changes in how to entertain are overdue, notes Michelin-starred chef Daniel Boulud. These days, people sit down at an invited dinner, “start texting, and a half-hour later, 18 of their friends show up. So it’s not about ladling the caviar anymore,” he says.

Instead, “it’s all about providing an artistic experience.” And he should know: Boulud, standing like some sort of beaming, charcuterie-ringed Thurston Howell on the deck of a seven-story superyacht, greeted a few hundred guests to the Four Seasons Hotel’s spectacular “Pop-Down” party in Miami this month. Questlove, the yacht’s DJ, provided a soundtrack as guests boarding the boat walked barefoot on Hermès-leather flooring among live citrus trees.

Much these days is bespoke; everything promises a personal connection. (Party planners are unplugging the VR headphones—a brand-party mainstay a year or so ago.) In Los Angeles, both Rodeo Drive and Beverly Hills tourism have partnered with artist Alexa Meade on a monthlong “Immersion in Wonderland” installation where guests wander her life-size artwork and are given costumes and makeup to blend in.

There are fewer professional models posing for paparazzi these days, and instead more actual interactions with artists and celebrities. An event at the Art Miami fair came complete with one-on-one chats with New York Academy of Art board member Brooke Shields. She talked to guests on why she and the school’s director, David Kratz, had selected the graduates whose art was on display, and on her own history with art. (She served as a muse to Andy Warhol, Richard Avedon, and Keith Haring.) The actress said it was a delightful change from being grilled about her personal life.

The event was hugely successful, selling out a third of the booth early on and luring Miami’s Perez Museum of Art founder George Perez and Shark Tank billionaire Kevin O’Leary to the fair. (Though O’Leary notes he always shops it on closing day because he gets “bargains!”) Artist Shepard Fairey, famous for his Hope image of Barack Obama, also stopped by to buy and looks to be Shield’s next artistic collaboration.

Sponsors may be making it more tempting to stick around, but guests are buying into it, too, notes McMullen, “People don’t want an ordeal,” he says. At many venues, the seating is softer, more loungelike and harder to get out of than in past years. (Designer Misha Kahn’s squishy new furniture collection, unveiled at the Edition Hotel, is even called the Bellyflop.)

In a crowded field, many of the more successful events have a charity component. Nobody was leaving the Sotheby’s–Larry Gagosian “Red Auction” for AIDS in Miami before host Bono sang (albeit briefly). The event raised about $11 million, half of that as a matching gift from Bill and Melinda Gates.

Art dealer Ben Milstein, who made a fortune early on in cannabis stocks and now sells artist-designed glass bongs, splurged at the auction, paying more than $200,000 for a custom diamond ring to be made for him with a laser by Marc Newson and Jony Ive. He bought it because “It was unique,” he noted—but also because he felt the money made a difference.

Veteran Four Seasons mixologist Melissa Hart, from Toronto, was in Miami and has been behind the bar for years. So how has what she’s seen and what she does changed over time? Hart says “People love a story.” In recent months, the resort chain has flown its top chefs, artists, and bartenders to Toronto, Philadelphia, and Miami from its resorts around the world to present their work at events while telling tales of local cuisine, traditions, and ingredients. As Hart shakes, the cocktails now come with a history, she says.

So, party planners, if you’re just serving crudités and Shiraz at your holiday events, you are in trouble. For one thing, you’re going to need a bigger boat.

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