Shane Watson: Cool pragmatism at wedding
Why a regular guy is the new must-have accessory for the woman who has everything.
Why a regular guy is the new must-have accessory for the woman who has everything.
Tomorrow is the day of Claudia Schiffer and Matthew Vaughn's wedding, an event that had any chance of spontaneity crushed out of it months ago. This is partly the nature of the celebrity event, of course - you can't guarantee paparazzi-tight security without precision planning. And when two loaded persons are joined together there's inevitably going to be a pre-nup - and the one with the most cash (Claudia, by £41m) is always going to clean up, as it were, in advance.
But there's something else about this imminent marriage that smacks of cool pragmatism and sets it apart from the average control freaks' wedding, and that is the overt message of downsizing. It isn't the first time a woman of property has lowered the bar and married a man who is unequal to her in terms of wealth and status (Liz Taylor did it with Larry "stonewash" Fortensky, to name one), but you know this arrangement has been entered into with a lot more consideration. After some deliberation, Claudia has simply concluded that there are no Mr Rights among her peers and she has placed her faith in the virtues of Mr Regular.
In the same way that the Trophy Wife or Girlfriend is a walking embodiment of all the female qualities a certain kind of man most appreciates (great body, nice clothes, good massage technique, open mind - particularly with regard to his appreciation of other women), so Regular Man is the answer for the woman who has everything.
Take Claudia. She already has money and she knows that seriously rich equals either old, decadent, workaholic, or David Copperfield. She has fame, power and a surfeit of contacts. What she needs now is someone who can handle himself around all of the above but doesn't think that sleeping in an oxygen cylinder and having his sphincter bleached is par for the course. Money can't buy you love and it definitely can't buy normality, and that is the luxury that most celebrities are on the waiting list for. Regular Man is the must-have for the woman who has everything else.
Regular Man likes football rather than owning the team. He has friends as opposed to a string of A-list acquaintances who happen to share the same agent. He washes his own hair, knows where the oil goes in the car, and hasn't even heard of an egg whites-only omelette (well, Matthew probably has, to be fair). He is not a self-obsessed actor or a bonkers magician or a feckless rich boy or any of the other candidates a thirtysomething multi-millionairess is likely to come across, and if he is the less influential element in the partnership, then she is grown up enough to handle that.
Say what you like about sexual equality, it hasn't happened until the women are holding the cards and marrying for the kinds of reasons men have traditionally tied the knot: comfort, sex, a friendly ear, someone to share in your success and support you in your endeavours.
Naturally, it isn't just the rich and famous of the female sex who are cottoning on to the advantages of partner downsizing - it's any number of self-sufficient thirtysomethings who have rejected the concept of aiming high. The truth is that this is the first generation of women who have both the resources and the confidence to pick their partners for reasons that have nothing to do with financial security or social ambition: in other words, on the basis that men have always made their choices. Downsizing women are merely demonstrating the same self-assurance that allows a 50-year-old bank manager to take up with a twentysomething model with impunity, or the head of Mensa to live with a woman who can't work the video.
As a general rule, partner downsizing works best when the downsizee brings something money can't buy to the party (in Claudia's case this is cool friends like Madonna, something that means a lot to a girl who, until a few months ago, was hanging out with Prince Albert of Monaco).
But it's worth remembering that downsizing is still a risky business, and that no matter how seductive the merits of Regular Man we're still battling genetic programming. After all, Kate Winslet was the heroine of downsizers everywhere until she got a whiff of Sam Mendes's superior power and influence.
Tomorrow is the day of Claudia Schiffer and Matthew Vaughn's wedding, an event that had any chance of spontaneity crushed out of it months ago. This is partly the nature of the celebrity event, of course - you can't guarantee paparazzi-tight security without precision planning. And when two loaded persons are joined together there's inevitably going to be a pre-nup - and the one with the most cash (Claudia, by £41m) is always going to clean up, as it were, in advance.
But there's something else about this imminent marriage that smacks of cool pragmatism and sets it apart from the average control freaks' wedding, and that is the overt message of downsizing. It isn't the first time a woman of property has lowered the bar and married a man who is unequal to her in terms of wealth and status (Liz Taylor did it with Larry "stonewash" Fortensky, to name one), but you know this arrangement has been entered into with a lot more consideration. After some deliberation, Claudia has simply concluded that there are no Mr Rights among her peers and she has placed her faith in the virtues of Mr Regular.
In the same way that the Trophy Wife or Girlfriend is a walking embodiment of all the female qualities a certain kind of man most appreciates (great body, nice clothes, good massage technique, open mind - particularly with regard to his appreciation of other women), so Regular Man is the answer for the woman who has everything.
Take Claudia. She already has money and she knows that seriously rich equals either old, decadent, workaholic, or David Copperfield. She has fame, power and a surfeit of contacts. What she needs now is someone who can handle himself around all of the above but doesn't think that sleeping in an oxygen cylinder and having his sphincter bleached is par for the course. Money can't buy you love and it definitely can't buy normality, and that is the luxury that most celebrities are on the waiting list for. Regular Man is the must-have for the woman who has everything else.
Regular Man likes football rather than owning the team. He has friends as opposed to a string of A-list acquaintances who happen to share the same agent. He washes his own hair, knows where the oil goes in the car, and hasn't even heard of an egg whites-only omelette (well, Matthew probably has, to be fair). He is not a self-obsessed actor or a bonkers magician or a feckless rich boy or any of the other candidates a thirtysomething multi-millionairess is likely to come across, and if he is the less influential element in the partnership, then she is grown up enough to handle that.
Say what you like about sexual equality, it hasn't happened until the women are holding the cards and marrying for the kinds of reasons men have traditionally tied the knot: comfort, sex, a friendly ear, someone to share in your success and support you in your endeavours.
Naturally, it isn't just the rich and famous of the female sex who are cottoning on to the advantages of partner downsizing - it's any number of self-sufficient thirtysomethings who have rejected the concept of aiming high. The truth is that this is the first generation of women who have both the resources and the confidence to pick their partners for reasons that have nothing to do with financial security or social ambition: in other words, on the basis that men have always made their choices. Downsizing women are merely demonstrating the same self-assurance that allows a 50-year-old bank manager to take up with a twentysomething model with impunity, or the head of Mensa to live with a woman who can't work the video.
As a general rule, partner downsizing works best when the downsizee brings something money can't buy to the party (in Claudia's case this is cool friends like Madonna, something that means a lot to a girl who, until a few months ago, was hanging out with Prince Albert of Monaco).
But it's worth remembering that downsizing is still a risky business, and that no matter how seductive the merits of Regular Man we're still battling genetic programming. After all, Kate Winslet was the heroine of downsizers everywhere until she got a whiff of Sam Mendes's superior power and influence.
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