From Vanity Fair, July 15:
Inside the $600 Million Ambani Wedding: Jewels, Stars, and the Party to End All Parties
The eye-popping celebrations from July 12 to 14 included a red carpet, Hollywood and Bollywood royalty, actual royalty, and some names that will surprise you.
There are weddings, and then there’s the Ambani wedding, the lavish series of events that has unspooled party by unbelievable pre-wedding party over the last several months and culminated this weekend with the union of Anant Ambani, the youngest son of super-billionaire Mukesh Ambani, and his new wife, pharmaceutical heir Radhika Merchant in Mumbai.
The celebrations from July 12 to 14 included a red carpet for attendees to walk, spotlighting the Hollywood, Bollywood, political, business, and tech luminaries invited to the wedding. Guests at the wedding, which cost a reported $600 million, included Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, John Cena, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Nick Jonas, Nicky Hilton Rothschild and James Rothschild, former U.K. prime ministers Boris Johnson and Tony Blair, stylist Law Roach, designer Prabal Gurung, Kim Kardashian and Khloé Kardashian, former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and many more, with a reported crowd of some 2,000 guests. It was an A-list cast worthy of a Hollywood production, evidenced by the fact that the Kardashians brought their own camera crew to document their trip for their eponymous show, as Kim revealed in her Instagram Stories.
At pre-wedding events throughout 2024, stars such as Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Akon, Katy Perry, Pitbull, Andrea Bocelli, and the Backstreet Boys performed for guests. The weekend of the wedding itself, headliners such as Adele, Drake, and Lana Del Rey were rumored, but guests danced to a more internationally-focused lineup of entertainment: Luis Fonsi performed “Despacito,” K’Naan offered up his hit song “Waving Flag,” Afrobeats star Rema got the crowd going, and Bhangra musician Sukhbir also took the stage.
The details and grandeur of the wedding are expected to set trends for celebrations “for decades to come,” insiders told Vanity Fair. Bride Radhika told Vogue that her new mother-in-law, Nita Ambani, was “the CEO of the wedding, as I like to say. “It was Nita’s commitment and vision that brought our entire celebration to life.” Nita was assisted by daughter Isha Ambani and daughter-in-law Shloka Ambani....
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The Hindustan Times has a couple dozen sidebar stories including:
The groomsmen got watches. From Tatler Asia, July 14:
Anant Ambani’s watches and jewellery: From Audemars Piguet gifts to bespoke Cartier brooches
Billionaire heir Anant Ambani dazzled with million-dollar timepieces and bespoke jewellery at his star-studded nuptials and gave Audemars Piguet watches worth US$240,000 each as gifts to his groomsmen
Have you ever heard of a wedding gift so extravagant that it costs more than the GDP of a small nation? That’s exactly what happened at Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant’s recent nuptials, where he gifted his groomsmen Audemars Piguet watches worth approximately US$240,000 each.
The limited-edition timepieces from the Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar series, known as the Luminary Edition, were presented to 25 high-profile guests. Among the lucky recipients were Bollywood superstars Shah Rukh Khan and Ranveer Singh, as well as close friends Shikhar and Veer Pahariya. These watches feature a 41 mm 18-karat pink gold case with a sapphire crystal back and a pink gold dial with a Grande Tapisserie pattern.
As for Anant Ambani himself, he showcased an impressive array of timepieces throughout the festivities. Tatler takes a closer look at the groom’s choicest collection of watches and jewellery....
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Flashing back on pre-partition India:
"Mechanical Elephant: The cult of Rolls-Royce in India"
If you are going to join a cult this looks like one to consider. From Road & Track:
When flamboyance met bespoke luxury, the amazing happened.
Dawn breaks in Hyderabad, and workers head out to collect the city's garbage in a fleet of Rolls-Royce sedans. 900 miles away in Jamnagar, a Phantom II, painted pink to match its owner's favorite slippers, coasts along the beach. There's a 20/30 Sedanca de Ville floating through the streets of Travancore, too, and it's got a miniature stool molded into its floor so that a "dwarf" can massage the passenger's legs.
Welcome to prewar India, where aristocrats engage in a lavish game of one-upmanship using the Rolls-Royce cars as fodder.
At the turn of the 20th century, India was under colonial British rule and divided into several hundred city-states, many led by native royal patriarchs called Maharajas. These men were rich, powerful, and obsessed with the pageantry of luxury. But in a time when automobiles were less reliable than weather reports, the most exclusive cars were ones that didn't break down.
Keen on cracking into the Indian market, a suave British businessman named Frank Norbury schemed a dramatic demonstration of engineering prowess in 1907 using his Rolls-Royce 40/50 hp: He threw out the Silver Ghost's toolkit, locked its hood shut, and drove 620 miles through Ghat mountain passes from Bombay to Kolhapur. The Maharaja of Gwalior was smitten; he had to own that motorcar....
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