For months, Becca Bloom, 27, the Atherton-bred, San Francisco-based “Queen of RichTok,” has been teasing her 6 million social media followers with the details of her planned Lake Como nuptials to David Pownall, an Amazon software engineer whom she met back in 2019 at a Philz Coffee in Palo Alto.
On Wednesday, Bloom, heiress to a Chinese IT fortune and an account manager at Bloomberg, dropped the full story of the Aug. 28 wedding, after a few days of radio silence.
“‘I am not missing :0 I got married! :D,” she wrote on a TikTok post that shows her walking down a mirror-floored aisle outside a lakeside mansion as the wind playfully teased her long, polished locks.
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Within a day, the video had been viewed more than 12.5 million times. The reaction was immediate and ecstatic. “So rich you can pay the wind,” one commenter wrote. “Watching your veil fly up was like watching an oyster reveal its most special pearl. Beautiful entrance, Becca,” said another.
The New York Times wondered, “Is this the most luxurious influencer wedding yet?”
If you’ve been living under a rock, or just don’t pay attention to these things, you might wonder why anyone cares about a local rich person’s wedding. It’s a fair question, especially as Bloom started her social media accounts only in January.
The answer is that she instantly struck a nerve. Her rise has been meteoric. Bloom’s shtick is that she lets you see what it’s like to be extremely rich, with whispered ASMR breakdowns of over-the-top routines so unrelatable they somehow become relatable, such as plating Beluga caviar on Versace china for her cat’s dinner. (She’s a cat lover, just like us!)
The performance of her wealth is so built into the content that followers enter into a parasocial relationship with her, feeling that their opinions and attention are an essential part of her lifestyle. She replies to fans, likes their comments, and encourages their interaction. In this way, she has spun conspicuous consumption into a group project rather than a hate-watch.
Case in point: In a video that was viewed nearly 20 million times in the runup to the wedding, she showed off the Lake Como mansions she had disqualified as venues; the top comment is, “Yea first one didn’t suit me too.” Bloom’s fans are more like collaborators than voyeurs.
They gobbled up all the details of her wedding-planning adventure, from her dress choices to unboxing gifts to figuring out which Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry to wear. In a response to a fan, she shared in January that they’d landed on Villa Balbiano, which costs $100,000 to $150,000 to rent for a weekend, as the location for the wedding. “$150k is actually not bad for 3 days. Says me with $3.50 in my bank account,” wrote a commenter.
But the final details of the ceremony were kept hidden until Wednesday due to an exclusive deal Bloom made with Vogue to cover the affair. From Vogue and her TikToks, fans learned that Bloom hired two witches to clear away rainclouds, wore a custom Oscar de la Renta gown, and walked down the aisle draped in $726,000 worth of jewels (necklace, ring, and earrings) from Van Cleef & Arpel’s Folie des Prés collection. When her new husband placed her Tiffany wedding band on her finger, he added $23,500 to that sum. Italian wedding planner Fredrica Beni estimated that the weekend cost $3 million to $4 million.
European weddings have been a summer staple for a certain wealthy tech set, what with the Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez takeover of Venice, Instagram VP Charles Porch and philanthropist Robert Denning’s tasteful Parisian wedding, and Eve Powell Jobs’ lavish U.K. wedding to British Olympian Harry Charles (reportedly produced by SF event planner extraordinaire Stanlee Gatti), to name just three.
While those weddings were also the talk of the internet, Bloom’s is unique in that followers were encouraged to have opinions throughout the process, from planning to the big reveal. And boy, did they.
“She’s an SFBWT! Let’s celebrate a bitch,” wrote one fan on the tongue-in-cheek San Francisco Bitches With Taste subreddit. “The pink flower dress is stunning. The gown with the cutouts, perfect on her. The long veil! Such drama.”
Of course, not everyone was gushing; many found the spon-con aspect of the wedding distasteful. “Having a paid partnership for her wedding day is so tacky,” commented one redditor, referring to Bloom’s Lancome partnership. Indeed, the hashtags #lancomeMakeup and #lancomepartner were prominent on Bloom’s wedding dress reveal Instagram post.
If the Como finale wasn’t enough for you, a sequel to the RichTok wedding lands next year. It will be a “spectacular, traditional Asian wedding on a much larger scale,” Bloom told Vogue, curated by her parents.