Duran Duran on the decks and a shark tank in the garden: how 50th birthday bashes became the new 21sts
So 50 is the new 21 it seems. Sales figures for party paraphernalia show that we are now much more likely to celebrate five decades on this earth than we are the traditional coming of age, with cards and whatnot for the big five-oh accounting for 16 per cent of sales compared to 14.1 for 21st birthdays. The official age of maturity, 18 (it was changed from 21 in 1969), lags even further behind at just 13.8 per cent.
There are obvious reasons for this. First, we live in an age of arrested development and improved wellbeing, so a 50th is likely to be a hedonistic celebration of one’s peak, a marker of a midpoint in life rather than a warning sign to the slow decline ahead. Second, birthdays long ago overtook weddings in terms of lavishness as we realised we were now statistically far more likely to make it to 50 than we were to stay happily married ever after.
Third, it’s all about the money. The 49-year-old of today has probably had a decent career already and bought his or her house for about 84p back in the recession of 1992. Today’s young can’t afford homes and face a future of prolonged economic attrition coupled with student debt or insecure employment: the average 18 or 21-year-old can probably only scrape together enough cash for a six pack and a Deliveroo pizza to celebrate a milestone.
I know of one man whose 50th birthday present to himself was the Raleigh Chopper he had been denied as a child
A 50th birthday is a chance to indulge oneself, to party like it’s 1999 and reward yourself with fripperies: I know of one man whose 50th birthday present to himself was the Raleigh Chopper he had been denied as a child. Of course he was too tall to ride it, but that’s not the point.
If you are lucky, your 50th year is a calm patch of peace and prosperity amid the choppy seas of responsibility. At 30 or 40 you’ve still got young kids and cash crises to worry about. At 60 or 70 your health may start to fail. But at 50 you are still young enough to have fun and old enough to afford a big blowout. A lavish 50th bash is a middle finger raised to mortality, a defiance of the ageing process, an assertion that one is still alive and kicking.
As so often in modern life, celebrities have led the way in this. In 2008, Madonna celebrated her 50th with a “modest” party for 90 people at the Volstead club in London, where David Blaine performed card tricks. In the same year, Naomi Campbell invited 200 people including her supermodel chums to her then-boyfriend Vladimir Doronin’s two-day 50th birthday affair at Mehrangarh Fort in Jodpur, where the cabaret act – Diana Ross – alone cost $500,000.
A 50th is likely to be a hedonistic celebration of one’s peak, a marker of a midpoint in life rather than a warning sign to the slow decline ahead
In 2015, Robert Downey Jr hired Duran Duran to play for guests including Jennifer Aniston and Katie Holmes at his half-century. Simon Cowell spent $1.6m on his, installing a shark tank in the grounds of Wrotham Park. Crown prince Pavlos of Greece arguably saved money on his 50th this year by combining it with the 21st birthday of his daughter Princess Olympia, but their OTT “Prince and the Revolution” bash in a grand Cotswold house included a photobooth decorated with stuffed lions and a guest list including the designer Valentino, Paris and Nicky Hilton, and sundry Delevingnes.
But even for civilians, a 50th allows one to be creative. When my wife turned 50 we toyed with the idea of a big bash at a hired venue, as we’d had for our wedding and for big anniversaries. Then we realised this was the very definition of the phrase “p***ing money up the wall”: it would last a few hours, we’d speak to hardly anyone, and end up with a huge bill. We realised that for less money we could have four lunch parties for 20-odd guests each, one week after another, at our house.
Caterers laid on a spread, we set up trestle tables in the basement living room, borrowed chairs, and cleared the ground floor of furniture for dancing, singing and carousing until the small hours. For a whole month, our house was party central, and the total cost was, symbolically enough, about £5,000. My work colleagues lived through it vicariously, as I’d come to work on Monday each week bearing leftover charcuterie and cheese.
When I turned 50 soon afterward – yes, I am a toy boy, of sorts – we felt it would be folly to try and repeat or better this endeavor, and went for variety instead. We took over a room above a pub one Friday for drinks with my current and former colleagues, a weird echo of my 21st birthday. But then on successive weekends we hired a house on the coast and invited the four couples we are closest to; followed by a houseboat on the Thames at Chelsea for drinks with on deck and dinner on the King’s Road. It had always been a fantasy of mine to live on a boat, so we decided to push it out instead. I mean, you’re only 50 once, right?
