This is what it's like to party with the Rich Kids of London

Ferraris, five-figure bar tabs and 150k followers on Instagram. Samuel Fishwick tries keeping up with the RKOL* *(that’s Rich Kids of London)

Beneath the filters of Cartier gold and St-Tropez bronze, London’s rich kids of Instagram have problems too. It’s midnight outside DSTRKT nightclub in Mayfair and a bouncer won’t let Evan Luthra park his Ferrari. The supercar edges up the gridlocked street, roaring discontentedly. This won’t be a moment he chooses to share on social media. ‘Instagram people only want to see the flashy side,’ Luthra says. ‘They want to see excess, that’s what sells. I understand what people want, and that’s why I’m the one making all the money.’

Luthra is a 21-year-old tech investor. He’s also one of the stars of the Rich Kids of London Instagram account. Set up in January, it documents the Monaco yacht holidays and Belvedere-fuelled nights out of London’s young and super-rich. With 149,000 followers, it has turned those (like Luthra) who appear regularly on it into social media celebrities themselves.

Evan Luthra Instagrams his lavish lifestyle 

When we first meet the day before, near Liverpool Street, Luthra’s fresh from investing £70,000 in a new app at a meeting nearby. The Delhi-born entrepreneur, who lives between a series of five-star London hotels (the W, the Park Lane and the Bulgari) only starts his business day at 2pm, and is done by 6pm. ‘You can trade hours for dollars, or trade ideas for millions of dollars in a fraction of the time,’ he says. ‘I don’t work hard, play hard. I work smart, then play.’

Wearing a £31,000 Audemars Piguet watch and custom-tailored shirt with spikes encrusting the collar, Luthra’s Instagram posts are his way of letting the world know that his cash is working for him.

In this world, excess equals success. The Rich Kids of London account is the UK version of the original US-based Rich Kids of Instagram (RKOI) — a curation of souped-up Insta posts from super-affluent sprogs around the world. Set up in 2012, it has spawned books deals and TV shows (including E4’s ongoing series Rich Kids of Instagram). Members of both accounts — as well as the other regional spin-offs, which include the Rich Kids of Dubai, France and Tehran — are well known to each other, running private WhatsApp groups between members and often joining each other for nights out.

Why do so many rich kids gather in the UK capital? ‘Because it’s London,’ says the RKOL’s founder, who wishes to remain anonymous. ‘Everyone knows London.’ Aged 24, little is known about him, aside from the fact that he’s not a RKOL himself (he works as a property broker). Instead, he merely edits the selection of images that are submitted (using hashtags such as #luxurylifestyle or #richkids) to the account.

Luthra has another theory for the popularity of the capital among his peers. ‘London’s got everything you want. Culture? Check. Clubs? Check. And everything else is just 45 minutes by plane. I can be in Monaco for the night, or go to Paris and eat dinner.’ He tells me he was at Mahiki the previous night until 6am — ‘a £20k night’ — and that he needs a rest. The next night we will go to DSTRKT, while the following day, he’ll enter a supercar rally to Ibiza. This will set him back £5,000 a head, but Luthra says his biggest concern is choosing a girl to bring.

The new status symbols of the super rich

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‘I met this one girl last night who was well-travelled and came back to my room with me, but there was another who was an investment banker,’ he says, his hair in a long ponytail, gel keeping his sideburns in check. Luthra says he gets hundreds of direct messages a day via Instagram from women and men wanting to meet up with him, often for more than business pitches: he shows me a message from one woman who will ‘do anything’ if he helps her with money. ‘They’re mostly gold-diggers,’ he says. ‘But I could just pick up a different girl in each city we visit and save myself some time.’

Luthra admits he’s a show-off. His dad, who owns clothing factories in India, set him up as an entrepreneur as a 12-year-old, and he’s been flaunting it ever since. ‘For me, Instagram’s like: why not?’ he says.

When he’s in LA, he uses an app to travel by helicopter at the touch of a button. He despairs of London’s traffic by comparison. The day after our first meeting, he introduces me to his friends, Siva and Abid, and we spend the afternoon touring Mayfair in a gold-plated Range Rover and red Rolls Royce, stopping to Instagram as we go. Luthra tells me they’ll often borrow each other’s flash cars to take a ‘unique’ shot for Instagram. How much do most shots set him back?

‘I could be at my penthouse chilling with some of my best friends and that would qualify as a good photo, and cost nothing,’ he says, ‘or I could charter a yacht, spend £50,000 and make a great photo out of it.’ We stop to take a few snaps of the boys with their toys. ‘You’ve not got personalised number plates man,’ laughs Siva, ribbing Abid, ‘you need to sort that out!’

Sipping on a glass of Laurent-Perrier in the bar of the Connaught Hotel, Julia Stakhiva, 24, tells me not every Rich Kid is self-agrandising. ‘Sometimes, I feel like the big sister to the group,’ she sighs.

Julia Stakhiva 

‘Evan likes to show off, and I’m the one who tells him to tone it down.’ Stakhiva, an only child, boasts her own Chanel-filled wardrobe worth £1.6m. She moved to London at 17 to study business at university, intending to take over her father’s food production empire in Russia — while juggling a ‘career in Hollywood’. She feels the pressure. ‘There’s a responsibility to do well, and sometimes I feel scared,’ she says. ‘But then we have champagne.’

Alexandra Dmitrieva 

Alongside her friend Alexandra Dmitrieva, 24, who joins us after having her nails done, Stakhiva prefers to post images of herself ‘dressed for brunch in Dolce & Gabbana’ rather than ‘childish’ images of ‘champagne brands’. Dmitrieva concurs: ‘I just laugh at those pictures of boys holding a Ferrari steering wheel with two over-sized watches.’ Her parents made their riches from oil in post-Soviet Russia, and she balances helping the family business with her job in the chemicals industry. ‘Trust me, if I went out driving a lambo — how do they say it? — balling out, and offered a guy a ride, he’d be coming back with me too. Certain types of guy are into it just as much as certain types of girl are.’

Stakhiva, who describes Instagram as like a ‘business card to tell the world about yourself’, has organised her own photoshoot for the afternoon, snapping lifestyle images with her £60,000 jewellery and £3,000 Chanel handbag against residential backdrops in Mayfair. These will end up on Instagram. ‘Most of the time people take photos for me.’ What else do people do for her? She has an intern, she says, and a PR team.

Does she worry about flaunting her wealth on social media? ‘No,’ she shrugs, pausing between pouts. ‘People around Mayfair can afford similar things, so I’m not worried about people stealing from me. If her destination’s outside Mayfair, she Ubers. ‘You can’t have a Chanel bag and Louboutin shoes and then go on the tube. That would be ridiculous.’ She turns to the photographer. ‘Shall we do a sexy one? What does sexy mean to you?’

Under the RKOL’s manicured exteriors, there are social faultlines. At Mews bar in Mayfair, I meet Dor Bukobza, 25, an Israeli self-made entrepreneur (he owns the distribution rights to cosmetics company Vine Vera, having started as a salesman five years ago). He counts himself among the original RKOI, as well as the RKOL, and is fresh from an 11-day shopping trip to Singapore and Hong Kong. Dressed in head-to-toe Gucci, he’s a bubbly, broad-smiling guy. ‘Money doesn’t mean that much to me,’ he says. ‘Sure, I’ve got shoes worth more than some of my friends’ cars, but those friends are still the most interesting people I know.’ However, he warns me, he knows of some RKOL who fake their wealth on social media.

Accusations of being ‘fake’ are an RKOL’s worst nightmare. Jack Watkin, 17, claimed to own a £1.7m fleet of cars and bragged of £15,000 shopping sprees, but was outed as a pretender earlier this year by The Sun, which reported that the Porsche he had been photographed with belonged to his mum. Perhaps that’s why unusual photographs are so valued among the RKOL. Luthra tells me he forks out £70,000 a year to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, sitting with Barack Obama and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Sure enough, his Instagram shows him, Wales and a bottle of Belvedere living it up at the conference.

Back at DSTRKT, and Luthra has found a parking spot in front of the club. Inside, a parade of bikini-clad women bearing sparklers and £1,600 bottles of Ciroc passes by, as Justin Bieber and Rihanna tracks play at deafening decibels. Luthra looks a little bored, phone lying still in his hand.

‘There’s nothing unique here,’ he tells me. Earlier he revealed that he hasn’t had a relationship for three years, and says now that he’s decided not to take the girl from Mahiki with him on the rally. Is it lonely, this life of excess? ‘I spend money to create memories.’ Does he think all this partying makes it harder to find love? He pauses. ‘I said I was in love once, with a girl from college back in India.’ What happened?

‘We’re still friends. But she was a cup of tea, and now I drink champagne.’ Some things, you hope, must be for show.

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