Meet Jeff Leatham, the florist beloved by royalty
When times are good, people spend on florists. And right now, business is downright blossoming
When Iranian fashion model Nazanin Jafarian Ghaissarifar married Nigerian oil heir Folarin Alakija in June 2017, the wedding was held at Blenheim Palace, an 18th century pile in Oxfordshire where Winston Churchill was born. The day featured a 12-foot cake and a performance by Blurred Lines singer Robin Thicke. But it was the flowers that stole the show.
Billowing waves of white roses— 1 million in all—cascaded across the floors. Thousands of white orchids dripped from chandeliers and reached in marshmallow arcs over fireplaces. The church altarpiece was made of hydrangeas.
The floral wizardry, which dominated social media and the Daily Mail for days afterward, was the work of Jeff Leatham, who serves a Hollywood clientele out of a Beverly Hills studio and also acts as the artistic director at Paris’s Four Seasons George V. The florist had done extravagant weddings before— check out the photos of Tina Turner’s Zurich nuptials in his book, Jeff Leatham: Visionary Floral Art and Design, published by Rizzoli in 2014. But this celebration was something else entirely. “It was, like, walls of orchids and walls of hydrangea,” Leatham recalls. “It was a floral orgasm dream.” The cost of a floral orgasm dream: $1.2 million.
It’s also a sign of the times: The rich are spending more on parties, music, and food. But according to Leatham—and industry experts— flower sales are a true bellwether for a society’s excess. Charlie Hall, an economist and professor of horticulture at Texas A&M University, says that before the last recession, in 2007, spending on floriculture reached $30.3 billion a year. That fell in 2008, to $28.9 billion, and again in 2009, to $25.7 billion, before climbing back to prerecession levels in 2016, hitting $30.8 billion. “The sales of flowers are what I call a coincident index,” Hall says. “There’s leading indices, lagging indices, and coincident indicators that are reflective of what’s happening right now. If you match up flower sales to GDP, it’s almost a perfect correlation.”
Cut flowers are a good barometer for the economy because they’re a luxury item for most consumers, says Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at the University of California at Davis. “If incomes go up, do cut flower sales go up just a little bit or quite a lot?” he asks. “The answer is quite a lot compared to any other agricultural product.”
Perhaps nobody has had a better seat for this decadence than Leatham, 47, whose phone case features an image of reality mogul and client Kris Jenner giving the finger. At his studio in the basement of the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills—a windowless, fragrant workspace stocked with vases of all shapes and sizes—handsome men artfully assemble arrangements such as a $1,400 “Gigantic Rose Bowl.” There’s a framed thank-you from Dolly Parton on a side table in his office—it reads: “Anytime I need something spectacular I know where to look.”
Leatham has more than 900,000 Instagram followers—due in part to his work with Jenner and the Kardashians—and his life is occasional fodder in tabloids such as Us Weekly and In Touch. At the George V, his opulent arrangements have turned the hotel lobby into a bona fide tourist attraction. “We’re using over 13,000 stems of flowers a week,” he says. “Just in that one hotel.” (His budget there is more than $7 million a year.)
In 2014, in a ceremony at Versailles, Leatham was awarded the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in recognition of his contribution to French culture. Now a Post-it above his desk reads: “Remember you’re a f--ing knight.” Not bad for a kid from Ogden, Utah. As a teen he worked the box office at a movie theater. At 19 he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for the Gap before being discovered by a modelling agent and shipped off to Europe to do runway work. He fell into flowers by chance in 1995 at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, working a part-time job for the in-house florist. Four years later he was hired by the George V, where he was able to hone his craft, thanks to the lavish budgets provided by owner Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.
Cut flowers are a good barometer for the economy because they’re a luxury item for most consumers