As Boris Johnson is to cake, so are modern next-gen inheritors to wealth. Let me explain.
With regard to cake, you may remember our erstwhile premier once pronounced himself both ‘pro having it, and pro eating it’. With regard to wealth, you may have noticed some people taking a similar line – happy to receive its benefits, but not so keen to suffer any drawbacks from doing so.
There are signs of this in the way celebrities have displayed their discomfort around the term ‘nepo baby’. Gwyneth Paltrow described it as an ‘ugly moniker’, while Zooey Deschanel told one interviewer that she’d prefer to ‘skip right over that if we can’. While the desire to ‘skip right over’ advantages conferred by one’s parents or bloodline is understandable, it has become far more difficult to do.
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In the UK, the likes of Reform (and, to a lesser extent, Labour), have created a political climate in which ‘the Establishment’ is a legitimate target of animosity. And the same is happening across Europe, too.
This is bad news for today’s heirs – the moneyed ‘next gen’. In London, some have even gone into hiding – or at least they’ve left Mayfair.
‘I am much more likely to put money into a padel club on Tottenham Court Road than a members’ club in Mayfair,’ says one twentysomething entrepreneur. It’s not that he has a problem with elitist environments; it’s more what certain postcodes represent. Mention a notoriously opulent Mayfair members’ club and he winces. ‘That feels like my parents’ idea of money,’ he says.
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‘The monogram-clad millionaire is a meme, not something my friends and I would ever aspire to,’ adds his business partner, a public-school-educated 23-year-old founder of an athleisure brand. ‘There are so many assumptions attached to privilege, and the first task for any next generation who wants to prove its worth is to stop those assumptions from becoming the whole story.’
‘I am genuinely making very different choices and living very differently from not just my parents’ generation, but even from those who were five or six years ahead of me at school,’ he adds. ‘I cannot imagine jumping on a private jet on a whim.’
Not surprisingly, Bain estimates that the luxury market lost about 50 million customers globally between 2022 and 2024, shrinking from 400 million to 350 million. Imran Amed, founder and editor-in-chief of The Business of Fashion, believes that ‘when wealth polarisation becomes so extreme that the ladder itself feels broken, aspiration melts away’.
[See also: London super-prime property sales at lowest level since before pandemic]
Legacy luxury houses may still be coming to terms with this – Rolls-Royce and the fashion and leather goods division at LVMH both saw declining sales in 2025 – but the young rich understand this instinctively.
‘When I say I live off the King’s Road, people assume the type of school, friends, holidays, even the kind of parents I have. I hadn’t told them anything, but I had told them everything,’ says a Gloucestershire-based director in her family’s manufacturing business. She hasn’t gone so far as to up sticks and move to a flat share in east London, though.
‘That is such a cliché,’ she laughs. ‘But I am more Gloucestershire girl than Sloane Ranger. I work in heavy industrial manufacturing and I live close to the business for most of the year because that is where the work is.’
[See also: Peers rival wealth managers as succession advisers to the next generation]
A decade ago, the safe route for a young heir was to be in creative industries: they founded brands, opened galleries, invested in restaurants, made documentaries or – of course – designed jewellery.
That has changed, with many believing that a lifestyle business, in and of itself, carries a whiff of unearned advantage. The same heiress has stopped telling people she works in ‘sustainability’ and is instead upfront about working in what is possibly a very polluting industry.
‘Using words like purpose, impact and community are red flags for privilege. I used to think people wanted to hear about these values,’ she said. ‘Then I realised talking about my work in this way made me sound like a minor working royal, hardly someone you would invest money with.’
In fact, the very young and very rich have developed an extraordinary coded lexicon. A family office becomes ‘a platform’; a trust is ‘long-term support’; philanthropic ventures are about ‘systemic change’.
The inheritors out there know the mood has changed, and that the new debate around dynastic wealth will not be conducted on the old terms that seemed to serve their parents. But anyone with the good fortune to have cause to worry about all of this may find some comfort in Jane Austen. Back in 1814, her character Mary Crawford assured us, in Mansfield Park, that ‘a large income is the best recipe for happiness’.
And, dear reader, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that remains true – for now, at least.
This article first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 100. Click here to subscribe
