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Monday, January 01, 2007

Billionaire Weddings

Take a gander at this Forbes article that speaks to the really high ticket Billion dollar weddings of the Uber rich and famous. I have done several 6 figure weddings, but always looking for those 7 figure brides out there in need of services:) If you're wondering where Tom and Katie fit in, their wedding was a mere $3 million, not in this league. (Absolutely Astonishing!)


Weddings
Billionaire Weddings
Suzanne Hoppough, 08.17.06, 12:00 PM ET

What kind of wedding would you have if money were no object? How about one with 10,000 flowers, 45 chefs, a 200-pound Grand Marnier Cake and live performances by Billy Joel and Tony Bennett. Sound excessive? Not for Donald Trump, who threw just such a bash when he married his third-wife Melania Knauss last year. The reception was held at his palatial 18-acre Mar-A-Lago club in Palm Beach. The star-studded guest list included such celebrities as Bill Clinton, Shaquille O'Neal, and Katie Couric. The showstopper was his bride's Christian Dior gown, which she modeled on the cover of Vogue last February, decorated with 1,500 rhinestones, it weighed 60 pounds.

Trump isn't the only billionaire who has thrown a glamorous and glitzy wedding. With wedding season in full swing, we decided to take a look back at some billionaire weddings to find out who besides Trump knows how to throw truly spectacular celebrations.

Five Billionaire Weddings

One particularly memorable affair was that of Russian billionaire Andrei Melnichenko and his bride-to-be, the former Miss Yugoslavia, Aleksandra Kokotovic. Melnichenko flew in both Whitney Houston and Christina Aguilera to perform at the September 2005 event, which took place on France's breathtaking Cote d'Azur. The affair was so over-the-top that rumors circulation that Melnichenko had a Russian chapel dismantled, shipped and rebuilt in France.

That same month also in France, luxury titan Bernard Arnault threw his daughter Delphine an enchanting wedding dubbed by Harper's Bazaar magazine as the wedding of the year. The ceremony was held in a cathedral in Bordeaux adorned with 5,000 white roses (Arnault reportedly persuaded another couple who had previously booked the cathedral to move their wedding to later that evening). The fashionable bride walked down the aisle in a gown designed for her by John Galliano, the designer for LVMH's Christian Dior label, which took 1,300 hours to make. The reception was held in a transparent tent at nearby Chateau d'Yquem, the winery owned by Arnault's LVMH that's known for its $100,000 bottles of wine. Guests included Elizabeth Hurley and Karl Lagerfeld. Happiest of all seemed to be the proud papa Arnault, who snapped his own photos and captured much of the day with a handheld video camera.

Still, the grandest affair so far this century was hosted not by Trump or Arnault but by the world's fifth richest man, Indian steel baron Lakshmi Mittal, who threw a $60 million extravaganza in honor of his daughter Vanisha's nuptials. The family sent out 20-page invitations in silver boxes. Mittal put up 1,000 guests in a five-star Paris hotel for the five-day affair. One night there was a party at Versailles; another event reportedly took place at a wooden castle temporarily erected in Parc de Saint-Cloud.

Mittal's event almost rivals what is considered to be the most extravagant wedding of modern time. The 1981 wedding of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who recently became the ruler of Dubai, to Princess Salama, earned that honor with its $44.5 million ($100 million in today's dollars) price tag. His family built a stadium big enough to hold 20,000 people for the celebration, which lasted an astounding seven days--hopefully long enough for the couple to greet all the guests. A quarter of a century later, it is still listed as the most expensive wedding in the Guinness Book of World Records.

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