From June 1st thru 3rd, the Shanghai Exhibition Centre (SEC) hosted one of its most popular trade shows. In a city where tradeshows are big business, this one stands above the rest as one which makes people of any industry salivate – the Millionaire Fair.
In its second year, the Millionaire Fair featured everything a budding millionaires and established bourgeois. The Shanghai’s rich, beautiful, powerful and connected came out for the Friday night opening. An invitation-only gala followed on June 2nd. Both nights included everything one would expect from some of the paparazzi ready nights Shanghai has to offer.
The SEC featured everything from sports cars, to food, couture fashion and jewelry. Highlights were status-icon stretch hummers, almost six-digit diamond jewelry and sharkskin, diamond encrusted laptops along with run-of-the-mill yachts and fine French wine.
Although one would think the gaudy affair would be the perfect creation of a sharp Chinese entrepreneur; the Millionaire fair is the brainchild of a Dutchman Yves Gijrath.
I went to the opening night, it was suppose to be a black tie affair. I would say out of the 1,000 people that went at best 25% had a black tie. The women were dressed so well, they were all decked out in 2,000-5,000 U.S designer evening dresses. Thye best dressed was the foreiners, the French took black tie to a new level, a white shirt black tie a jacket and blue jeans and sneakers. The event it’s self sucked, you were walking in circles because they did not provide a map. Most people did not even see the side wings and what they offered. The main hall had no event times posted so you had no idea what was going on.
The wine samples were less than a 1/5 glass of wine, the finger foods were definetly small fingers. They were also weird finger foods and they tasted weird. It’s definetly not worth the 1,800 tickets. They funny thing is that you could of bought a ticket at the door from a scalper for 100 RMB.