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hen Iranian fashion model Nazanin
Jafarian Ghaissarifar married Nigerian
oil heir Folarin Alakija in June 2017, the
wedding was held at Blenheim Palace,
an 18th century pile in Oxfordshire
where Winston Churchill was born. The day featured a 12-foot
cake and a performance by
Blurred Lines
singer Robin Thicke.
But it was the lowers that stole the show.
Billowing waves of white roses—1 million in all—cascaded
across the loors. Thousands of white orchids dripped from
chandeliers and reached in marshmallow arcs over ireplaces.
The church altarpiece was made of hydrangeas.
The loral wizardry, which dominated social media and the
Daily Mail
for days afterward, was the work of Jef Leatham,
who serves a Hollywood clientele out of a Beverly Hills studio
and also acts as the artistic director at Paris’s Four Seasons
George V. The lorist had done extravagant weddings before—
check out the photos of Tina Turner’s Zurich nuptials in his
book,
Jef Leatham: Visionary Floral Art and Design
, published
by Rizzoli in 201
4. But this celebration was something else
entirely. “It was, like, walls of orchids and walls of hydran-
gea,” Leatham recalls. “It was a
loral orgasm dream.” The cost
of a loral orgasm dream: $1.2 million.
It’s also a sign of the times: The rich are spending more on
parties, music, and food. But according to Leatham—and indus-
try experts—lower sales are a true bellwether for a society’s
excess. Charlie Hall, an economist and professor of horticul-
ture at Texas A&M University, says that before the last reces-
sion, in 2007, spending on loriculture reached $30.3 billion a
year. That fell in 2008, to $28.9 billion, and again in 2009, to
$25.7 billion, before climbing back to prerecession levels in
2016, hitting $30.8 billion. “The sales of lowers are what I call
a coincident index,” Hall says. “There’s leading indices, lagging
indices, and coincident indicators that are relective of what’s
happening right now. If you match up lower sales to GDP, it’s
almost a perfect correlation.”
Cut lowers are a good barometer for the economy because
they’re a luxury item for most consumers, says Daniel Sumner,
an agricultural economist at the University of California at
Davis. “If incomes go up, do cut lower sales go up just a little
bit or quite a lot?” he asks. “The answer is quite a lot compared
to any other agricultural product.”
Perhaps nobody has had a better seat for this decadence
than Leatham, 47, whose phone case features an image of real-
ity mogul and client Kris Jenner giving the inger. At his studio
in the basement of the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills—a window-
less, fragrant workspace stocked with vases of all shapes and
sizes—handsome men artfully assemble arrangements such as a
$1,400 “Gigantic Rose Bowl.” There’s a framed thank-you from
Dolly Parton on a side table in his oice—it reads: “Anytime I
need something spectacular I know where to look.”
Leatham has more than 900,000 Instagram followers—due
in part to his work with Jenner and the Kardashians—and his
life is occasional fodder in tabloids such as
Us Weekly
and
In Touch
. At the George V, his opulent arrangements have
turned the hotel lobby into a bona ide tourist attraction.
“We’re using over 13,000 stems of lowers a week,” he says.
“Just in that one hotel.” (His budget there is more than $7 mil-
lion a year.)
In 2014, in a ceremony at Versailles, Leathamwas awarded
the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in recognition
of his contribution to French culture. Now a Post-it above his
desk reads: “Remember you’re a f---ing knight.” Not bad for
a kid from Ogden, Utah. As a teen he worked the box oice
at a movie theater. At 19 he moved to Los Angeles, where he
worked for the Gap before being discovered by a modeling
agent and shipped of to Europe to do runway work.
He fell into lowers by chance in 1995 at the Four Seasons in
Beverly Hills, working a part-time job for the in-house lorist.
Four years later he was hired by the George V, where he was
able to hone his craft, thanks to the lavish budgets provided by
owner Prince
Alwaleed bin Talal
of Saudi Arabia.
“I remember us being able to play and have fun,” Leatham
says. “We’d make something, say, ‘I don’t like that,’ and throw it
away. Just thousands and thousands of stems of lilies. It would
be in the lobby, and I’d be like, ‘No, I want to do purple.’ ” He
credits his early success to “his Highness,” as he calls Alwaleed,
who provided room to create his signature look. The “Leatham
Threes” are “clean, simple, chic,” the lorist explains. “Never
mix more than three types of lowers.”
Leathammoved back to Los Angeles in 2016, but he travels
to Paris every ive weeks to style the George V. “In L.A. they
don’t respect artists. They respect television stars,” he says.
“There’s a respect for artists in Paris. They could give a f---
about celebrities.”
Even so, it’s celebrities who drive his brand. When Jenner
stayed at the George V in 2014, he illed her roomwith lowers.
The George V is where he met Turner and Oprah Winfrey. “My
biggest clients, my greatest friends—how did you meet them?
In the lobby of the George V. I did Chelsea Clinton’s wedding.
Where did I meet the Clintons? In the lobby of the George V.”
(After Hillary lost the presidential election, he sent a handwrit-
ten letter. Did she want lowers? “I’m sure that’s the last thing
she wanted,” Leatham says.)
The now-iconic lower wall he created for Kim Kardashian
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DECOR
Bloomberg Pursuits
October 8, 2018
W
There’s a framed
thank-you from
Dolly Parton on
a side table: “Anytime
I need something
spectacular I know
where to look”