Europe’s rich and famous faced tough decisions as they assembled at a chic Swiss ski resort this weekend: whether to drink Taittinger or whisky-infused hot chocolate, and which piglet to back in the afternoon race.
This wasn’t Davos, where the World Economic Forum will urge presidents and bankers to “rethink capitalism” this week. Neighbouring Klosters, a resort favoured by the British royal family, held its eighth annual snow polo tournament.
While young Swiss socialists protest against the power of political elites in igloos outside Davos, Duran Duran sang “A View to a Kill” to several thousand polo enthusiasts reveling in a bar and nightclub made out of shipping containers and snow. The four-day event, sponsored by menswear company Hackett Ltd. and Swiss watchmaker Parmigiani Fleurier, is a chance to forget the global turmoil, according to founder Daniel Waechter, who runs a family business selling luxury lavatories.
“Despite the financial crisis, we’ve never had so many team requests,” he said. “Last year we had a lot of trouble getting British teams over. Now, either they’ve recovered or they’re saying, enough of this misery, we want to have fun.”Eight teams of three horses and riders apiece, instead of the usual four, battled it out in a slimmed-down version of summer polo, which was first played in Switzerland by British cavalry officers in St. Moritz in 1899. The horses wear flat shoes with studs to grip the snow and riders, who can use six ponies during four 6 1/2 minute chukkas, wield mallets to hit a ball between goalposts shaped like giant champagne bottles.
As Klosters’s VIP guests ate roast saddle of veal with morel mushroom mousse, khaki-clad soldiers rolled out barbed wire in Davos. For David Roth, president of Switzerland’s Young Socialists, there will be fewer comforts this week as he builds an igloo that will serve as a base to protest against the forum.
“In the Arab revolution, it was a revolution for democracy and I think we need also a revolution for democracy,” said Roth. “The politicians are not independent from the money and that is a problem.”
After German Chancellor Angela Merkel opens this week’s Davos forum, which will be attended by close to 40 national leaders, the first debate will ask “Is 20th-century capitalism failing 21st-century society?”
“We certainly have in the world today a morality gap,” Klaus Schwab, founder of the forum, told reporters in Geneva on Jan. 18. “We have undermined social coherence and we are in danger of completely losing the confidence of future generations.”
The gap between rich and poor is widening across most developed economies as executives, bankers and skilled workers reap more rewards, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said last month.
The average income of the richest tenth of the population is now about nine times that of the poorest tenth, the Paris- based OECD said. The gap has increased about 10 percent since the mid-1980s with Mexico, the US, Israel and the UK among the countries with the biggest divide between rich and poor.
“I’m going to Davos to talk with business and world leaders about jobs, inequality and the excesses of bankers’ bonuses,” said Philip Jennings, general secretary of the Nyon, Switzerland-based UNI Global Union, which coordinates more than 20 million workers in 150 countries. “I certainly won’t be going there to play polo.”
Still, while Schwab warns of “global burnout,” the luxury market is close to a record. The Bloomberg European Luxury Goods Index, which includes LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Cie. Financiere Richemont, climbed 163 percent since Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, while the Stoxx Europe 600 Index dropped 5 percent.
The resort’s association with the royal family makes Klosters the ideal place for London-based Hackett to promote its clothing that is a “romantic vision of Englishness,” said Jeremy Hackett, 58, the firm’s co-founder, who arrived in an Aston Martin Rapide.
“I feel like James Bond arriving in Zurich into a Cold War sort of atmosphere,” said Hackett, adding that polo helps give his company “authenticity.” “It’s a way of adding credibility to the brand.”
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