No, Sofia Richie's Wedding Wasn't 'Stealth Wealth'
But it *was* a lesson in celebrity restraint
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Before her wedding festivities started to take over social media on Friday, I had no idea that Sofia Richie was getting married this past weekend. I don’t say that to be shady, but rather to highlight how unexpected it was that her nuptials completely drowned out anything else that was happening in the world of celebrity for a few days.
Sofia hasn’t exactly been top of mind for casual purveyors of celebrity recently, and I think that’s a good thing, actually. It’s easy to forget that she dated Justin Bieber for a bit before moving onto Kourtney Kardashian’s ex, Scott Disick, who she somehow ended up in a three-year relationship with. Her engagement to Elliot Grainge garnered some coverage last year, but other than that she’s just been quietly living a fabulous life: traveling with Elliot, doing some modeling, nabbing a brand partnership here and there, becoming the beauty director of something called NUDESTIX and palling around with her sister, Nicole Richie.
She’s been so under the radar that she didn’t even make it into Vulture’s big nepo baby cover feature at the end of last year! Her father is legendary singer and current “American Idol” judge Lionel Richie and her sister is a notoriously reformed party girl, designer and one of the funniest people of her generation (I will die on this hill). While people who follow her on social media no doubt were tuned into the leadup to her wedding, Sofia just wasn’t on the general public’s radar before this, which speaks both to her general palatability (if people found her annoying, they would’ve been talking about her more) and self-awareness as the daughter of a famous person who knows what people want from her. As Sophie Ross said on Twitter, “I love a nepo baby like Sofia Richie tbh. No real acting resume, no pretend career, no quotes about how hard she works. Just being rich and fashionable on instagram, and vibes.”
And, despite having dated two of the most famous male celebrities in America (Scott not so much anymore, but before Kourtney’s whirlwind romance with Travis Barker, a lot of attention was still being paid to his love life to play into the will-they-won’t-they narrative he maintained with Kourtney), nobody really knows that much about Sofia. I saw so many comments on her wedding content remarking on how people had no idea what she even sounded like.
All of this created the impression that she lives an understated life, which she doesn’t. Again, maybe she does in comparison to some of her contemporaries or in comparison to what people might expect from a nepo baby without a discernible job title, but her Instagram feed is still an endless stream of well-lit, fashion-forward glamour shots around the world. Nothing too crazy, but it’s still apparent from her photos that she is wealthy and lives a luxurious life. (That’s what I want from a celebrity of her ilk, by the way — no complaints here.) But when chic content from her wedding started to pick up steam, there was a sort of collective, “Whoa! Where did this come from?”
The wedding was at the most famous hotel in the South of France, the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, and Sofia donned a series of three custom Chanel dresses throughout the festivities. She also wore a few similarly elegant looks in and around the weekend, documenting each with individual solo shots in which she posed nonchalantly as she tends to do. Everything she wore had a classic, grown-up, restrained feel. It’s hard to recall from recent memory a celebrity bride looking this glamorous, and the glamour came naturally to her.
The rest of the celebrity-filled wedding — sister Nicole, father Lionel, Paris Hilton, Cameron Diaz, Good Charlotte’s Joel and Benji Madden were all there — was refined and embraced its South of France locale. Her bridesmaids all wore black, the groom was in a classic Ralph Lauren tux, the florals were all white, as was the aisle it took everyone seven minutes to walk down. The whole thing was gorgeous and tastefully done. A true fairytale wedding that was impossible to look away from.
When the inevitable coverage and TikTok analysis started to roll in, though, a trending phrase kept being thrown around to describe what we were being treated to: stealth wealth. Also commonly referred to as quiet luxury, stealth wealth is exactly what it sounds like — dressing and operating in a way that doesn’t call attention to how much money you’ve spent. Wearing expensive pieces without any logos. If you know, you know, but you don’t, then you won’t. It’s tied to old money and the saying “money talks, but wealth whispers.” It boomed into the zeitgeist earlier this year when Gwyneth Paltrow dressed in quiet luxury for her viral ski trial just as the final season of “Succession,” whose unfathomably rich Roy family pretty much epitomizes stealth wealth in the way they dress. (For more on how the sudden interest in stealth wealth and how it ties into the current economic uncertainty, read this article from Fortune.)
Anyway, back to Sofia’s wedding. W Magazine ran an article that said “the entire weekend was a master class in stealth wealth.” There were countless TikToks making the rounds that declared the same thing, and it seemed to be the prevailing take until another swath of people corrected them. As Melissa Michelle remarked on Twitter, “She booked the most expensive resort in the South of France and wore custom Chanel the entire weekend, how is that stealth exactly?” When something is stealth, it doesn’t want to be detected. It seeks to fly under the radar. Sofia Richie’s wedding, albeit dreamy and chic and stunning, got exclusive coverage in Vogue, featured performances by Lionel Richie and Good Charlotte and was documented on social media in real time by guests like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. That’s luxury, for sure, but it’s not exactly quiet.
It’s almost like we’re so used to ostentatious displays of wealth from our celebrities these days that when someone comes along who doesn’t cover themselves in designer logos at every event they go to, we’re not only surprised by it, but we’re drawn to it. We praise it, even. For so long, we’ve been so inundated with stars who subscribe to the Kardashian school of fame — where more is always more and there’s no such thing as overexposure or doing too much — that there might finally be a permanent shift happening where the opposite has become the preference.
And it’s not just about the way that celebrities dress; it’s also about how much they show us. Trina Watters made an astute point on Twitter when she pointed out the difference in the way content disseminated from Sofia’s wedding and, say, Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker’s over-the-top Dolce & Gabbana-fied wedding in Italy last year: “The steady stream of perfectly curated content from Sofia Richie’s wedding making you feel like you’re there but also wanting more is where the Kardashians have missed the mark lately.” Give us enough to whet our appetites, but avoid overkill. Leave us hungry for more. While Kravis’ nuptials of course generated tons of coverage and a recent Hulu special, it wasn’t as obsessed over. Whether it was over saturation, their incessant PDA, the fact that it was their third wedding, the Dolce & Gabbana of it all or maybe just general Kardashian fatigue, the reaction to their wedding felt more like an obligation than a natural fascination.
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Which makes Sofia’s former connection to the Kardashians through Scott Disick kind of funny to think about. While she appeared on “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” a few times while she dated Scott, she was mostly in the background. It felt like something she was doing because of her relationship, not because she wanted to. After a pair of headline-making relationships, it’s no surprise that she clearly craved something more private. Raising your own profile by dating a few super famous people before ultimately settling with someone more behind-the-scenes or tangential to the entertainment industry is nothing new — just look at Jennifer Garner and Reese Witherspoon and Julia Roberts and Jennifer Lawrence. All of which circles back to Sofia’s aforementioned approach to being a nepo baby and celebrity. Much like her sister, Nicole, who is much more private than she was back in the early 2000s, Sofia is privileged to be in a position to embrace the best parts of being a young, hot, rich celebrity who is the child of another celebrity — burst back into the public consciousness to get married and give Vogue the requisite wedding exclusive, lean into the interest in having “the wedding of the year,” pick up a bunch of new followers to up your sponsorship rates and then go back to living your relatively quiet, luxe lifestyle with your new husband. After all, the Met Gala is on Monday, and it’s about to take over your Instagram feed. It’s almost like Sofia timed her wedding perfectly.