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Friday 4 July 2008

Taki is right: we are all still snobs

Vassi Chamberlain was taken to task by the poor little Greek boy over her powers of social observation. On reflection, she concedes that snobbery has never truly gone out of fashion

I was recently upbraided in this magazine by your High Life columnist, a person I’ve liked and admired for many years, regarding a piece I’d written for Tatler on the ski resort of Gstaad. Taki can sometimes get painfully close to the bone, but he let me off lightly. His point was that I hadn’t understood what made the place tick because only the new-money arrivistes had spoken, as opposed to the chic old lot who had run for the hills. This was an interesting point. I’d assumed that we, not just as a nation but as human beings, had grown out of or at least softened our attitude to snobbery. I thought that we had stopped instinctively revering the old and rubbishing the new. As it turns out I’d been as stupid as David Cameron believing that his goal of a classless Britain was remotely achievable. How could I have been so naive?

The idea for the Gstaad piece came from a colleague who had been a guest in one of the resort’s swankier chalets at Christmas. My editor asked me to write the introduction (I’ve skied there virtually every year for the last 27, although admittedly for no more than a week at a time) and my colleague would write about the various hostesses.

In the last five years Gstaad has been invaded by the new rich London crowd that outbids itself for £10 million properties in Chelsea, Holland Park and Notting Hill. It’s a set riven with petty jealousies, in-fighting and Olympian spending (yachts, private planes, £10,000 fake logs in marble fireplaces). When skiing they think nothing of hiring a private ski instructor for each of their children (why bother with ski school when you might miss a showing-off opportunity with your own guide?) and buying £300 ski jackets for five-year-olds with real fur-trimmed hoodies. The twin central obsessions are money and vanity. It used to be an old-style glamorous and fun place, but now it’s also self-indulgent and ridiculous.

Even Taki agrees with me on this point. There’s plenty of old money and very chic people to keep Gstaad’s heritage going for a bit longer, but there’s also even more new money, which by the old money’s standard is deplorably un-chic. With all this money racism, you’d have thought they’d have had to put up the Swiss equivalent of the Berlin Wall. But here’s the rub. Both factions co-exist quite happily and go to each other’s parties. Until, that is, somebody links their names in print. The issue has proved so incendiary that there has apparently been little other conversation this season.

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