Worthy Of A King's Ransom

Here Is Why We Still Take Our Shopping Cues From Royalty, And What Their Favourite Things Are.

- Hindol Sengupta

NEVER WEAR, THE MAHARANI of Jaipur Gayatri Devi was warned by her grandmother, emeralds with a green sari. They go much better with pink. That she took the advice seriously was vouched for, later in life, by Amitabh Bachchan, no less. As a Delhi university student, the feted actor would play truant to go see polo matches at the capital’s Jaipur Polo Grounds and remembered the princess as a surreal sight in coral chiffon. It is the colour that dominated a five piece special collection created by Indian designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee in 2013 as a tribute to the maharani, routinely described as one of the world’s greatest beauties or “a dream in a sari and jewels” as Vogue fashion magazine once wrote.

Gayatri Devi encapsulated the “life of novelistic dimensions”, as The New York Times called it upon her death in 2009. This is the reason why even in 2018, one royal wedding, that of Prince Harry of the House of Windsor and American actor Meghan Markle, can give a boost of more than $100 million to the British economy. And that’s why this time in the annual luxury issue that you now hold in your hand, Fortune India’s focus is on that simultaneously eternal and ephemeral thing called royalty.

For nearly a decade, the Fortune India luxury issue has tried to serve as a thinking person’s guide to consumption. In these pages, through the years, we have worked through examples from King Louis XIV of France to Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen, author of