Dior Spa Cruise 2023
Luxury and wellness in the age of “Stealth Wealth”
Our platform has always been about yoga access and making the practice as available to as many people as possible.
In the early days “access” meant creating a giant online resource guide to all of the yoga studios in Paris (their urls, addresses, yoga styles, classes, price ranges, workshops, events, trainings… oh my!) to ensure that folks wanting to #doyogainparis could find what they were looking for1.
Then “access” became about more than just creating a clear, easy-to-use yoga directory; it became about ensuring that EVERYONE could find an easy-on-the-wallet entry point. Over the years we’ve discovered and highlighted affordable yoga classes, as well as opportunities for work-exchange and volunteering.
So why are we going to talk about Dior Spa Cruise 2023, a high-end wellness event that features yoga and takes place on a yacht docked in the Seine?
Because it’s absurd and obscenely expensive and just the sort of over-the-top gimmicky add-on designed to appeal to the extremely wealthy and the tone-deaf luxury brands that cater to them during Haute Couture fashion week. Who cares about boats filled with migrants seeking a better life and dying at sea2 when you can pull up a yacht and offer beauty treatments, yoga and fitness classes?
According to Dior’s press release, the Dior Spa Cruise 2023 promises to be:
An exceptional wellness retreat on the Seine
For this new edition, Dior Spa Cruise will be moored at Port Henri IV from July 3rd to 14th 2023, for ever more enchanting cruises on the Seine.
On board, this exceptional treatment area offers customized holistic retreats for absolute mental, emotional and physical well-being.
There’s no doubt that the Dior Spa Cruise will be enchanting, the treatments exceptional, and the entire affair super luxurious, conceived to cosset a clientele accustomed to being pampered from head to toe. If you’ve always wanted to see and experience IRL this level of self-care, you now can.
What you can expect from Dior Spa Cruise 2023
The yacht, named “Stunning Excellence”, will be moored just behind île Saint Louis and offer customized programs designed around five themes: Detox (July 6th and 13th), Balance (July 9th and 11th), Reverse Aging (July 12th and 14th), Power (July 8th) and Relaxation (July 7th and 11th).
There are three categories of cruises—Treatment, Fitness, and a combo called Treatment & Wellness—and these can be booked for one person or two if you want to indulge à deux. The Treatment and Fitness cruises each last 120 mn, the combo cruise lasts twice as long, and the prices reflect the additional time on the water. If you fall in love with Dior’s creams, fluffy robes, yoga mats, free weights (and no, none of these are affiliate links 😛), they will all be available for purchase.
A luxury is, after all, a product, service or experience nobody really needs but many people desire.
For the price-curious:
280€ Fitness cruise for 1 person (the least expensive option)
1920€ Treatment & Wellness cruise for 2 people (the most expensive option)
For the fitness-curious:
Detox Flow with Adrien
Yoga Flow with Alice
HIIT with Maxime
Respirology (WTF? You mean Pranayama?) & Stretching with Nicole
Mobility with Lara
Pilates Flow with Maxime
Dior Spa Cruise is most definitely not stealth wealth
A luxury yacht blanketed bow to stern in Dior branding is not quiet luxury. It’s showy and it’s loud. The Spa Cruise event is all about telegraphing money, prestige, privilege and exclusivity, in the same way that LVMH (which owns Dior) closing and carpeting the Pont Neuf in Damier Check for Pharrell Williams’ first show as LVMH’s menswear Creative Director was the flex of the season. It’s about asserting power through product placement and media attention.
It doesn’t matter if the cruise doesn’t result in more sales of creams designed to reverse aging, or clothing or perfume or accessories; that’s not really the point. People who purchase haute couture don’t need creams to reverse aging—that’s what plastic surgery and cosmetic dermatology are for. They don’t need wellness cruises for cultivating “absolute mental, emotional and physical well-being” either— that’s what private yachts, personal coaches, chefs and trainers are for.
A luxury is, after all, a product, service or experience nobody really needs but many people desire. All organic produce is a luxury for some; a reservation at a hard-to-get-into restaurant is a luxury for others. A carbon fiber road bike or perfume can be considered luxuries. Is wellness a luxury? Should paying attention to how you feel, inside and out, be a luxury? Is self-care something that can even be bought?
Oh sure, it seems obvious now that a yoga studio might want to have a functional, updated website with links that aren’t broken, but back then NONE OF THAT WAS TRUE. Nearly all of the websites were useless with wonky schedule tables and more often than not, our research landed on 404 page after 404 page.
Or at the other end of the economic spectrum, the über rich on an extreme—and extremely dangerous—adventure trip to the Titanic wreckage…