THE WORLD IS A STAGE

MONACO: A SUNNY PLACE FOR SHADY PEOPLE

CAMILLA ASHCOMBE

June 4, 2026

Moving through gallery openings, exclusive dinners, cocktail lounges, and restaurants where nobody appears genuinely hungry, this essay explores Monaco as both fantasy and gilded cage: a place where luxury has become content, discretion survives mostly as an aesthetic category, and the rich increasingly perform their own lives online with the manic discipline of unpaid influencers.

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Monaco has perfected a peculiar paradox: a place built entirely around freedom that often feels strangely claustrophobic. In this miniature country of immaculate facades, everyone has escaped something: taxes, weather, regulation, aging, ex-spouses, journalists, occasionally even reality itself. Wealth circulates with near-religious intensity, yet nothing ever appears fully relaxed. Everything is managed, rehearsed, photographed, and permanently on display. Social media has only accelerated the condition, depicting worlds of money, inheritance, class anxiety, taste, loneliness, exile, and power into an endless stream of identical images: champagne glasses held toward sunsets, yachts mistaken for personalities, watches photographed beside steering wheels, women performing effortless beauty with the concentration of Olympic athletes.

She arrived in Monaco shortly before dusk, after two and a half hours in the back of a black Maybach that felt less like transportation than insulation with leather seats. The driver had been waiting outside her Milan hotel precisely seven minutes before the arranged time, standing beside the car with the expressionless patience of someone accustomed to transporting people who never carry their own luggage and rarely open their own doors. He sported a navy cashmere coat that had been worn one too many times—not quite Loro Piana, probably Zegna or Canali—over a nondescript charcoal suit and spoke in the subdued, acoustically perfect tone common among European drivers attached to old hotels and wealthy families, a tone suggesting both absolute discretion and excellent mineral water recommendations. Nothing about him appeared hurried. Even traffic seemed to move differently around him, as though ordinary urgency had been politely asked not to enter the vehicle.

The doors closed with the sound of expensive cabinetry. Outside the windows, northern Italy unfolded in slow, cinematic fragments: toll booths, tunnels, pale winter light over the Ligurian coast, terraces of depleted olive trees, occasional glimpses of the sea appearing suddenly between concrete barriers before disappearing again. Inside the Maybach, the world was muted. Messages arrived on her phone but went unanswered. Time flattened. She listened to her travel playlist: medieval choral music, fragments of anonymous fifteenth-century liturgical recordings, voices echoing through stone cathedrals that no longer belonged to any empire still standing. At times it sounded less like music than like memory itself, suspended somewhere between prayer and static. The driver said nothing. Neither did she. The voices drifted through the cabin while the highway curved toward Genoa and then Monaco like something inevitable and slightly underfunded.

In Monaco, even getting out of a car is rehearsed.

At some point after Sanremo, the driver asked whether the temperature was comfortable. It was the first thing he had said in nearly ninety minutes.

She had not been to the Côte d’Azur in years. Her ex-husband had moved to Cannes in the early 2000s, often remarking that everyone there is hiding something: money, age, lovers, taxes, passports, origins, scandals, surgeries, failures, entire previous lives. The Riviera has always functioned as a geography of elegant concealment, a place where reinvention acquires Mediterranean light. Her variation on this theme was even simpler: Nobody comes to the Côte d’Azur accidentally. Everyone has a past, but nobody discusses it before lunch.

Her friend had sent the car from Monaco. An Italian woman named Alessandra, whom she had met in Paris the previous year at a dinner where nobody remembered exactly who had invited whom, although everyone vaguely suspected the invitation had originated from money. Alessandra belonged to that category of European wealth that no longer announced itself directly because announcement had become unnecessary generations earlier. She lived primarily in Monaco now, though there was also the house in London, the villa near Grasse, and a private island somewhere off the Amalfi coast that she referred to casually, as though private islands were mainly logistical inconveniences involving boats and maintenance staff.

She had once said, while pouring wine in Paris, “People who discuss money directly are usually worried about it.” The remark had remained with her.

Monaco appeared suddenly, almost theatrically, after the highway curved around the cliffs. Dense white high-rises stacked above the water like a financial hallucination. Balconies. Glass. Yachts resembling small nations anchored in the harbor below. Everything looked both permanent and strangely temporary at the same time, as though the entire principality had been assembled quickly for a conference involving billionaires, tax attorneys, and cosmetic surgeons.

The driver passed the Hôtel de Paris, where men in dark coats stood beside black cars speaking quietly into earpieces with the solemnity of intelligence operatives protecting very important governments, rather than hedge fund managers attempting to have dinner. Tourists photographed Ferraris with the devotional seriousness once reserved for saints’ bones. A woman in cream cashmere descended from a Rolls-Royce while someone nearby filmed her vertically for Instagram. Nobody appeared surprised by any of this. Wealth in Monaco had become weather; continuous, atmospheric, and mildly exhausting.

A civilization organized entirely around arriving somewhere.

The primary reason for coming to Monaco was an opening at Hauser & Wirth, whose large gallery space sits directly in the center of the principality, a stone’s throw from the famous casino—hence the prestigious address 1 Place du Casino—positioned somewhere between luxury boutiques, discreet financial offices, and apartment buildings where entire floors remain dark for most of the year because their owners appear only occasionally, usually in excellent linen. Hauser & Wirth itself possessed the polished neutrality now perfected by international blue-chip galleries: stone floors, museum-scale walls, lighting engineered so carefully that it seems designed to remove time itself from the experience of looking. The exhibition paired works by Mark Bradford and Rita Ackermann, a combination that felt highly strategic, balancing institutional seriousness with the reassuring possibility that the work might also appreciate nicely in the foreseeable future.

Bradford’s layered surfaces carried their familiar language of urban erosion and social mapping, while Ackermann’s paintings dissolved bodies and gestures into forms hovering somewhere between intimacy and collapse. The rooms were crowded with the traveling population that now moves perpetually between Basel, Hong Kong, London, Palm Beach, Paris, and New York with little interruption to their internal climate: collectors, advisers, younger gallery people attempting studied indifference, women wearing clothes so expensive they had ceased to signify expense at all. Waiters circulated with champagne while conversations unfolded in English, French, Italian, and Russian, sometimes all within the same sentence and occasionally within the same opinion.

A sales director with the composed patience of a diplomat guided the attendees through the show. At first, the works were explained almost entirely through art history. Bradford was connected to postwar US abstraction, even institutional critique, the material residue of urban life. Ackermann was linked to European modernism, the fragmentation of the figure after expressionism, and painting’s long anxiety about representation itself. The language was polished, superficially intellectualized, and delivered with the confidence of someone who had repeated these arguments in multiple cities over many decades.

Then, almost imperceptibly, the tone shifted. The paintings began acquiring another kind of meaning. One Bradford had recently been discussed by a major museum. An Ackermann from a comparable series had doubled in value within a few seasons. Certain works were described as “still early.” Others were “already difficult.” The conversation moved from influence and form toward scarcity, placement, momentum, secondary-market stability. The transition happened so fluidly, it barely registered as a transition at all. Art historical significance and financial speculation no longer contradict each other here, she realized. They function as parallel forms of authentication, each reinforcing the other until the paintings themselves seem suspended somewhere between cultural achievement and highly sophisticated commodity. The language of the press release felt collaboratively produced by an art historian and a hedge fund manager concerned about portfolio diversification.

The true luxury was finding someone not photographing a car.

Alessandra’s apartment occupied the upper floors of a building overlooking the sea. Not modern exactly, but recently renovated in a careful manner intended to erase all visible evidence of renovation—or effort generally. Enormous windows left almost bare. Books arranged without appearing arranged. White orchids in rooms large enough to make ordinary conversations feel slightly insignificant. The apartment possessed the particular silence associated with very expensive places, a silence created partly through architecture and partly through the near-total elimination of practical anxiety. There was staff, though never visibly. Glasses disappeared. Doors opened. Coffee arrived. Problems presumably dissolved elsewhere.

Alessandra greeted her wearing wide white trousers and a navy sweater draped over her shoulders with the studied carelessness of someone who had spent years perfecting the appearance of not thinking too much about clothes while thinking about them constantly. She kissed her lightly on both cheeks and asked about Los Angeles in the same tone one might use to ask about weather patterns or political unrest in distant countries.

“You still live there voluntarily?” she asked.

Knowing that the bulk of Alessandra’s art collection was distributed across her properties in London and particularly the villa near Grasse, she was slightly surprised by what she found inside the Monaco apartment. There was a rare work by George Condo, of the large Antipodal portraits from the 1980s, usually referred to as his artificial realism series; several pieces by Warhol, obviously, including a luminous blue Jackie; and a massive Jean-Michel Basquiat that had served as the centerpiece of his retrospective at Fondation Beyeler a few years earlier. Most astonishing of all was an enormous sculpture by Jeff Koons, so large it appeared better suited to a sculpture garden than a Monaco apartment, raising the obvious question of how it had entered the building at all. “Oh, Jeff came himself with his team and assembled it inside,” Alessandra explained casually, as though discussing floral arrangements. And everywhere, almost impossible not to notice, were works by Louise Bourgeois, dispersed throughout the palatial rooms like small psychological traps hidden among the luxury.

Later they sat on the terrace drinking champagne while the harbor below them darkened into scattered gold reflections. Alessandra spoke vaguely about Gstaad, vaguely about someone divorcing someone else, vaguely about a dinner during Milan Fashion Week where a tech founder had embarrassed himself by mentioning Nietzsche after his third Negroni. She spoke the way wealthy Europeans often speak, with precise disinterest. Nothing appeared capable of fully impressing or fully disturbing her, although one suspected poor tailoring might come close in the latter department.

At some point she mentioned the island off Amalfi, only because she needed to decide where she would be in early June.

Some people inherit wealth. Others inherit the obligation to display it correctly.

“Monaco becomes intolerable during the race,” she said, referring to Formula 1 with the same tone others reserve for mold.

They left the apartment shortly after eight. The driver was already downstairs.

First they went to Sass Café, which one does in Monaco either before dinner or very late after midnight, though the latter requires a certain tolerance for spectacle and recently divorced men rediscovering youth through table service. By one in the morning, the room tends to transform into something faintly exhausting: sparklers attached to vodka bottles, women dressed for a version of glamour that exists primarily on Instagram and in the memories of the Riviera during the 1980s, men wearing white sneakers with the aggressive confidence of people who have recently discovered wellness.

The room glowed in amber light. Tables leaned slightly too close together. Music drifted in from somewhere indistinct, elegant enough to suggest taste while remaining forgettable enough not to interrupt conversation. Waiters moved quickly but never appeared rushed, balancing cocktails on silver trays with the concentration of jewelers transporting stones. Women in black dresses sat beside men who looked as though they spent very little time in offices and enormous amounts of time discussing investments over lunch near marinas. A successful car salesman from Hamburg spoke loudly about Saint Barth while pretending not to notice Dimitri Payet entering discreetly through the back. Nearby, salespeople from the luxury boutiques around Place du Casino scrolled through photographs of clients wearing clothes they themselves could never afford. Everyone appeared suspended inside the same atmosphere of cultivated wealth, softened by alcohol, Mediterranean air, and the strange unreality unique to Monaco, where even the harbor lights trembling against the black water seem professionally maintained.

The strange thing about Monaco, she noticed almost immediately, is that nobody ever seems entirely relaxed despite the atmosphere of cultivated ease. Everyone appears to be monitoring visibility itself. Who had arrived. Who had noticed. Which table one had been given. Which car waited outside. Even boredom looked strategic. Young women photographed martinis beneath low lighting while men in soft suede loafers checked their phones with expressions suggesting billion-dollar negotiations rather than text messages about dinner reservations. A blonde influencer in white satin posed briefly beside the entrance before disappearing again into the crowd like an advertisement searching for its product.

“It used to be discreet,” Alessandra said almost nostalgically. “Now everyone wants to be seen possessing the right life.”

Even the parking valets look like they have trust funds.

After the aperitivo they walked to Avenue 31, where the dining room carried the subdued glow of places designed primarily for people who never look at prices, and not at food, either. Watches flashed briefly beneath cuffs before disappearing again. Women whose faces suggested expensive dermatology and disciplined hydration leaned across tables discussing schools in Switzerland and houses in Ibiza with the seriousness of diplomatic negotiations. Nobody opened menus. Nobody appeared hungry. Alessandra ordered without looking down. Waiters greeted guests by name. Bottles arrived already understood.

Outside the restaurant, supercars idled while small crowds gathered around them with near-religious concentration. Young men filmed Bugattis from multiple angles. Influencers emerged from Ferraris with expressions combining pleasure and calculation, as though luxury now required active management. One blonde stepped out of a black car while six strangers photographed her simultaneously. Nearby, a man in a pale blazer leaned against a Rolls-Royce speaking loudly into his phone while periodically glancing at his own reflection in the window. Nobody seemed fully present. Everyone appeared to be documenting themselves inhabiting the idea of Monaco.

After dinner, they walked slowly toward the Hôtel Hermitage for digestifs. The lobby carried the hushed atmosphere of places designed to absorb noise rather than amplify it. Elderly men in linen jackets sat beside women twenty years younger, drinking martinis beneath arrangements of white roses that probably cost more than small automobiles. Somewhere a piano played softly enough to avoid becoming actual music.

From the terrace, one could see the lights of Monte Carlo descending toward the water in precise geometric layers. Below them, another Bentley arrived. Then a vintage Porsche. Men stepped out, adjusting cuffs. Women stepped out, adjusting expressions.

At the next table two American girls discussed “old money aesthetics” while taking photographs of drinks they barely touched. One wore a white silk dress with MIU MIU woven repeatedly into the fabric itself, lest anyone accidentally mistake it for ordinary silk, and spoke admiringly about Connecticut despite sounding unmistakably from Minnesota. Neither looked older than twenty-two. Alessandra rolled her eyes almost invisibly.

“Social media,” she said quietly, “has made everyone believe wealth is a personality.”

This seemed true. The older version of wealth had depended on privacy. The new version depended on circulation. Cars, dinners, hotel entrances, yacht decks—all of it now existed partly to become content. Luxury had become participatory theater. Below them, tourists still lingered, photographing parked cars under the yellow lights of Casino Square. A crowd had gathered around a black and orange McLaren while a man in white trousers sat inside drinking from a crystal glass as though reenacting an advertisement for his own life. People filmed him constantly. He never looked up once.

She left the next morning for Nice, a city Monaco’s rich speak about with the vague condescension reserved for places considered necessary but insufficiently exclusive. People went there for the airport, sometimes for practical errands, occasionally for dinner at Nespo, widely considered the only genuinely good restaurant between the Italian border and Marseille, though sadly it attracted almost the same people as Sass Café. The same finance men speaking too loudly about boats and waterskiing. The same women with disciplined faces and extraordinary jewelry, pretending not to notice who entered the room. The same atmosphere of carefully managed spontaneity, where even pleasure seemed scheduled several weeks in advance.

Somewhere between a tax haven and a very expensive group hallucination.

Yet it was here, just outside Monaco, in Villefranche-sur-Mer, Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Èze, and Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, that the real money existed: people so wealthy they did not need Monaco for tax purposes and therefore could afford to find it vulgar. Even older money occupied certain pockets of Nice itself, secluded neighborhoods like Mont Boron and Cimiez, places of fading aristocratic villas, inherited grand apartments, a type of French haute bourgeois wealth so old it no longer required performance, and families that had forgotten where their fortunes had originated. People there could not even be bothered to think about Monaco, let alone mingle there. To them, the principality remained less a center of power than an aggressively well-marketed waiting room for rich people.

At Nice Côte d’Azur Airport, she stared for a moment at the private terminal, astonished by the sheer number of jets resting on the tarmac in the pale morning light. Never had she seen so many private planes gathered in one place. Alessandra had casually offered the use of her jet the evening before, as though offering a ride across town, but she had already booked a business-class flight on British Airways to London and onward to Los Angeles. While this perhaps registered as faintly déclassé by Alessandra’s standards, changing plans now felt somehow more exhausting than luxurious.

Inside the airport, the duty-free zone reminded her immediately of Monaco itself. The same boutiques. The same immaculate displays of watches, handbags, champagne, and cosmetics arranged with liturgical precision. Even the sales staff possessed the identical expression of polished discretion, as though trained to acknowledge wealth without ever appearing impressed by it, a skill increasingly rare in the modern world. Walking past illuminated storefronts she had already passed in Monaco less than twelve hours earlier, she had the strange sensation that the Riviera had begun reproducing itself endlessly—the same stores, the same faces, the same gestures repeating from terminal to harbor to hotel lobby with only minor variations, like a luxury franchise designed to eliminate the inconvenience of encountering a genuinely different world.

As she boarded the plane, she flipped absently through Instagram, looking at posts already appearing from Monaco only minutes after the parties themselves had ended. Champagne glasses held toward the camera. Women standing on terraces above the harbor in dresses chosen less for memory than for documentation. It struck her suddenly that what social media presented as wealth was in fact only one very narrow and highly performative form of it, the kind specifically designed to survive compression into images. So many other forms existed, but were almost entirely invisible: the wealth of privacy, of time, of intellectual freedom, of not needing to turn one’s existence into evidence. The wealth of old friendships. Of reading slowly. Of being able to disappear.

Perhaps the most powerful luxury was no longer access to excess itself, but access to spaces where nothing needed to be displayed, explained, optimized, or envied. She looked once more at the endless sequence of identical dinners, identical yachts, identical faces arranged under slightly different lighting conditions, and wondered whether the final stage of wealth was not accumulation at all, but the ability to remain opaque in a world increasingly organized around permanent visibility.

Camilla Ashcombe was born in London in 1978 into what she calls “the lower end of acceptable wealth.” Unlike many of the people she writes about, she still works for a living, dividing her time between producing films, art advising, writing essays on luxury culture, and moving through expensive places with the faint detachment of someone close enough to observe them but not wealthy enough to disappear fully inside them. She is known for always writing about herself in the third person, treating even her own life as a form of social anthropology.

Cover image: The Riviera’s preferred form of small talk: horsepower, real estate, and strategic indifference.