Today we’re taking a little break from the private club world and going to the South of France, where one of the most photographed hotels on earth has been steadily rewriting the rules around taking pictures on the property. The reason involves everything from outfit changes to irritated regulars and non-hotel guests spending hours using the property as their own photo set. Writer Christina Jelski, who follows RPS on Instagram, was the one who alerted me to just how specific Hotel du Cap’s photography rules have become. The hotel has spent years dealing with the less charming side of becoming an influencer backdrop. More on that after the jump.
Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc dates to 1870, but much of its mythology was built in the 1920s, when Gerald and Sara Murphy—two of my favorite largely forgotten figures from that era (I used to live across from their former Greenwich Village townhouse)—helped turn the Riviera into a summer playground and drew a crowd that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter and Picasso. (If you know nothing about the Murphys, I would advise starting with this 1962 New Yorker article, Living Well Is The Best Revenge). Fitzgerald later immortalized the hotel as the Hôtel des Étrangers in Tender Is the Night. The Kennedys stayed there, Slim Aarons photographed there, and during the Cannes Film Festival it has long functioned as its own little center of gravity, and as the home of the annual amfAR gala. Cannes Lions has widened that guest list considerably, with brands and media companies hosting events at the hotel and bringing in a wave of influencers and advertising people who might never otherwise have made it past the gates. Its seawater pool and Grande Allée are almost as recognizable as the hotel itself.
Also in today’s letter: (contained) chaos at the Hamptons International Film Festival and a letter from the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, Australia’s yummy mummies discover cocaine, Larry Ellison buys eight Florida homes for his staff, Prada courts its biggest spenders in Milan, Neiman Marcus closes its downtown Dallas flagship, Shoreditch House faces a food-safety investigation, Oura postpones its IPO days after Scott Galloway talked it up, Kering’s new CEO tries to make luxury run a little more like Renault, and more…
