Clubbing, St Tropez-style
“TELL only your best friends,” read the staff T-shirts at Nikki Beach, St Tropez’s youngest and hippest beach club and bar on Pampelonne Beach — the richest, raunchiest, most hedonistic strip of sand on the Côte d’Azur. Judging by the Ferraris, Porsches and Mercedes parked outside, the nightlife impresario and Nikki Beach co-owner Eric Omores has some pretty loaded friends.
Once inside the club — a chic mix of driftwood tables, rustic cabanas and white sail canopied roofing, spread around a swimming pool on the edge of the sand — my suspicions are confirmed. Honeyed, nubile bodies, drenched in Cristal champagne, writhe in tiny Dior bikinis to the summery soundtrack of Balearic beats. Draped around the pool is an eye-popping cocktail of Czech princesses, ageing playboys, investment bankers and gravity-defying models.
“Is there a VIP area?” I ask, naively. “It’s all VIP,” says Omores, 43. Of course it is. As if Naomi Campbell, who held her 30th birthday party here, would choose a venue that lets in mere “P”s. But an order does emerge: the Romanesque white daybeds around the pool are reserved for those who can afford to drink at least one magnum of champagne (the cheapest costs £200) every 30 minutes. Any slower and they are chucked off to make room for some other princess or rock star’s son who will, which probably explains why almost as much champagne gets sprayed around as gets drunk.
Next is the outdoor restaurant, then the beach loungers, while bottom of the food chain is the large circular bar, where the poorest — and arguably also the coolest and most attractive — kids drink bottled beer and look on, with a mixture of awe and disdain, at proceedings around the pool.
“There are three types of people who come to Nikki Beach,” explains Jean-Dimitri, a French investment banker in his late twenties, while pouring me a glass of champagne (a generous gesture). “The old money, the new money, and the wannabes with no money.”
To get the look, ladies, you will need clothes loud with logos (Dior, D&G and candy coloured Louis Vuitton are this season’s favourites), a tiny bikini (top half optional) and extremely high heels. It’s a look somewhere between country estate and council estate — shockingly expensive, yet somehow most people still look cheap. Guys simply need money — the more the better.
The Nikki Beach concept is now a global phenomenon. When Senegal-born, French-educated Omores, a nightclub owner and promoter, opened the first Nikki Beach in Miami in 1999, there was nothing quite like it. It differs from more traditional nightclubs in that it’s as much about the lifestyle and the look as it is about the music — Nikki Beach doesn’t bother with guest DJs, for example, choosing to stick to a staple playlist including mainstream hits by the likes of Beyonc é and Britney. It’s a daytime club, most popular from around 3pm to 9pm, at which point guests move on to restaurants and more traditional clubs, and it closes by midnight. There’s no admission charge, there’s food but eating is not why you visit — and there are those wildly expensive drinks.
There are now Nikki Beach clubs on St Bart’s, in Marbella, St Tropez, a new one in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and on Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda. The core clubbers spend their summers travelling from one Nikki Beach to the next, as does Omores.
Nikki Beach has now spawned copycat clubs across the world. From The Shore Club in Miami, to the LA Standard’s weekly pool parties, to the Bousalas Beach Club in Halkidiki, which attracts cool clubbers from all of northern Greece, it’s a simple formula that looks set to grow.
The St Tropez Nikki Beach, which opened in 2000, may be appealing to a younger crowd on the Côte d’Azur, but summer beach clubs are nothing new here. In fact, it was the clubs of St Tropez that inspired Omores to start the concept. “The idea was to create something that felt Mediterranean and jet set, a club that you could go to in the daytime to dance, to relax, to go wild,” he told me.
La Voile Rouge, farther up Pampelonne Beach, opened in 1972 and is the original hedonistic outpost, one of the first beach clubs on the Pampelonne strip to flaunt a bare breasts and booty policy. But La Voile Rouge isn’t sexist: not only is the interior decorated with stucco penises on the walls, but its lothario owner, Paul Tomaselli, started the trend for sporting male thongs long before Peter Stringfellow.
As we arrive, sirens blast and sparklers fly through the air. The drag queen-cum-manager parades through the crowd hoisting a silver bucket containing at least 12 magnums of champagne.
Minutes later, David Guetta’s appropriately titled Money starts shaking through the speakers. The silicone-enhanced, booth-tanned, bottle-blonde girls in their uniform Dior bikinis climb on to the tables and start to shimmy. Corks pop and champagne showers the club. By the end of the track, sheer Cavalli kaftans are drenched to reveal tiny Pucci bikinis.
Tomaselli, now in his late sixties, watches from his wheelchair with a jaded look that says he’s seen it all before. In buoyant mood, he defends his club as a place “for fantasy, for sex, for girls, for life. I propose a culture. The others just propose that you eat.” But the fantasy isn’t cheap, with a bottle of Dom Perignon costing £330, and the club doesn’t take credit cards, so you have to bring lots of cash.
Of course, for the truly super-rich, such crass displays are to be avoided. When it comes to the old-moneyed euro elite there’s only one place to play: Les Caves du Roy at the Hotel Byblos — a St Tropez institution since 1967. The club is so kitsch it’s cool: the casino-cum-cabaret decor remains unchanged since the basement club first threw open its doors. The flashing palm tree columns and rotating disco ball compete for attention with the Cavalli, Dolce and Versace-clad divas on the dance floor.
Joining the jet set can mean queuing to get in — sometimes for up to three hours — even if you’re a multi-millionaire. If you have an ounce of cool, you won’t even think about queueing until after 1am.
And if you get in, you can probably afford a methuselah (the equivalent of eight bottles) of champagne — the Cristal Roederer goes for a cool £16,500 a pop. When P Diddy showed up in 2002, the Sultan of Brunei sent five methuselahs to his table. That same summer, two Pakistani brothers set the record by spending £260,000 at the Caves in one night. When a glass of water costs £16, it’s not that difficult to see how it could happen.
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Nikki Beach - St. Tropez
Added 2008/06/13 @ 17:35:35
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