MOSCOW
THE price of a Gulfstream G550 airplane, fitted with a Rolls-Royce engine and enough fuel capacity to fly nonstop from Moscow to Los Angeles, starts at $54 million. But that is small change to some of the Russian rich.
“It seats up to 18 passengers,” said Dan Firer, a Gulfstream representative. “But none of them ask for that many seats because it is for a private family or a company president.”
Mr. Firer was manning the Gulfstream booth last Friday at the Millionaire Fair, a four-day orgy of conspicuous consumption held at a cavernous exhibition center on the outskirts of the capital. In addition to Gulfstream, over 200 other luxury purveyors had set up display stands, hoping to interest newly moneyed Russians in everything from mahogany-paneled yachts to diamond-encrusted car grilles worthy of 50 Cent.
Mr. Firer warily eyed a bright orange Porsche at the booth next to his.
“That’s a nice car, but it is nickels and dimes compared to us,” he said. “After the United States, Russia is the second-biggest market for private aircraft.”
Fueled by an oil boom, the Russian capital seems as awash in cash as Dallas was in its heyday.
“We went through the same thing in the 1890s when some Americans came into giant wealth and flocked to Europe, where they were viewed as materialistic,” said Marshall Goldman, a senior scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.
Like the Saudi high rollers of the 1970s and the Japanese in the 1990s, Russians are emerging as the world’s most visible free spenders. The most exclusive luxury brands are seeking their share of the klondike. Elsewhere in Moscow this week, a conference on the luxury industry has drawn Donatella Versace, Tom Ford and Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH, to exchange ideas about how to sell high-priced goods to markets like Russia. (The conference is organized by The International Herald Tribune, which is owned by The New York Times Company.)
Russia has 53 billionaires worth a total of $282 billion, according to the Forbes list of the richest people. In addition, the second-tier rich include 103,000 Russian millionaires who are collectively worth $670 billion, according to a study on the evolution of personal wealth in the former Soviet Union written by economists at the Center for Economic and Financial Research, a think tank here. (The World Bank says that in 2005, 15.8 percent of Russians lived below subsistence level.)
“There are hundreds of millionaires in Moscow — that is why we are all here,” said Nicole Marais, a sales and marketing representative for David Morris, the London jeweler. She was attending the fair for the first time in conjunction with the brand’s Russian distributor, the Soho Jewelry Group. “The women are all impeccably groomed and the men are all worth a fortune.”
Wandering the halls Sunday night, dressed in evening attire, two real estate agents, Evgenia Yumatova, 21, and Svetlana Turovtsova, 26, described both themselves and their clients as millionaires.
“I was looking at the cars and I’m trying to decide between the Infiniti, the Mercedes and the Porsche,” said Ms. Yumatova, who reeled off the designer clothing she was wearing like a red carpet veteran dishing with Joan Rivers.
The Millionaire Fair, an annual consumer event founded by a Dutch entrepreneur named Yves Gijrath, is in its third year here. Mr. Gijrath, who stages similar events in Amsterdam and Shanghai, said the show’s purpose is to introduce wealthy Muscovites to foreign luxury brands that they may not have encountered on their travel to popular watering holes like Cap Ferrat, Gstaad and Courchevel. He estimated that this year’s show could generate direct and follow-up sales of about $743 million.
“Over the last five to 10 years, car brands and fashion brands were the first adopters to set themselves up in the Russian market, but otherwise there is no tradition of luxury brand awareness here,” Mr. Gijrath said. “Now every luxury brand is interested in Russia: boats, real estate, interior design, watches, antiques, helicopters.”
The fair seemed primarily aimed at the nouveaux riches, the type of brand-driven Russian shoppers who would be willing to sit through several hours of traffic to tour a drafty warehouse that gaudily juxtaposed Cadillac Escalades, platinum penknives, Mövenpick ice cream, custom pool tables, apartments in Dubai and Gund teddy bears. Members of the general public could buy tickets for 30 euros ($44.57).
“Russians are interested in learning what brand is the most expensive and the best,” said Mr. Gijrath, who was sitting patriotically at a booth of the Dutch porcelain manufacturer Royal Delft, in front of a wall-size re-creation of a Rembrandt painting made of hand-painted blue tile. “Of course, Russians are more interested in bling-bling.”
Indeed, vendors here said that Russians with old money (10 to 15 years is old, by Russian standards) have already moved on from flashy logos to the kind of understated limited-edition brands that would not market themselves at a trade show.
Still, several thousand people, whether cash millionaires, emissaries of millionaires or just tourists, thronged the halls every day. And some of them were buying.
On the first night of the show last Thursday, Roman Ershov, the general manager of King Koil beds here, said he had sold two $70,000 mattress sets made of silk, cashmere and cotton, interwoven with gold threads.
Also on the first night, Mikhail Lyubiumov, the sales manager for A1 Moto, a company that outfits high-end cars with high-end alarm systems, said that his company had sold the bright orange Porsche, for $170,000, to a Russian millionaire.
By Sunday afternoon, Andrei Karapetian, the president of L.A. Connection, a company that customizes luxury cars, said he had sold three car grilles, resembling interlinked chain bracelets, for Rolls-Royce Phantoms, at $55,000 each. He showed a reporter a car wheel, designed for a Russian casino owner, with spokes that he had encrusted with colored Swarovski crystals so that it looked like a roulette wheel. The cost: $22,000 for a set of four.
“The Russian millionaire who wants ostrich leather wheels or a picture of his wife’s face made out of cubic zirconium, is not necessarily going to drive on those wheels,” Mr. Karapetian said. “He is going to keep it in his 30- or 40-car garage.”
Even if many of his Russian clients are rich, Mr. Karapetian said the phrase “Russian millionaire” did not convey much exclusivity at the moment, given the surge in real estate prices here. “If you bought an apartment in Moscow three or four years ago, you are probably already a millionaire, at least on paper if not in cash,” he said. “There are more of them than you think.”
Those who were not millionaires could at least pretend to be rich at the stand run by Alliance Continental, a Russian asset management firm. The company had erected four red British-style telephone booths, stuffed with piles of counterfeit million-dollar greenbacks. Azad Karryev, the company’s marketing manager, said his team had printed 500,000 fake bills for the Millionaire Fair.
Passers-by stopped to toss piles of money around, ask their friends to snap cellphone images of them reclining amid ersatz wealth, or just to pocket a couple of million.
“You see, in Moscow, everyone can feel himself a millionaire,” Mr. Karryev said.
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