SHOW OFF ISLAND
Once a discreet retreat for old-school glamour, now the D-list are making Mykonos...
she arrived by boat in a sleeveless shift and simple headscarf. And as the world’s most famous woman stepped ashore, waving away the offer of a car to explore the local shops by foot (she stopped in one to buy a wooden boat for her young son), the seeds were sown for an obsession that would shape the rest of her life.
It was 1961, two years before the assassination of her husband, and the start of Jackie Kennedy’s Greek love affair.
Not with Aristotle Onassis — she did not meet the shipping tycoon who became her second husband on that first trip — but with the magical island of Mykonos.
Sensationally pretty and famed for its squat, white and blue houses and seven thatched windmills, it wasn’t long before this Aegean archipelago drew the hollywood jet set to its shores.
Grace Kelly, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman and Marlon Brando soon discovered the island’s attractions for themselves. Where better to drink ouzo and party barefoot on white beaches in glorious solitude?
Skip forward to this summer, and how times have changed. For the celebrities who head to Mykonos now, privacy is the last thing on their minds.
Take Sir Philip Green, who dined there this week with Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner and American designer Tommy hilfiger. Possibly bored with Mykonos’s oldworld charm, Sir Philip ordered around 200 plates to be delivered to their restaurant table, and started flinging them into the air like confetti. Modest, it was not.
But then, the controversial former BhS boss is just one of several figures to have been lurking in the bars and restaurants of Mykonos of late.
Other premier league show-offs to have colonised the island this summer include racing driver Lewis hamilton, seen wandering up and down the beach clutching a bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne, Lindsay Lohan, who pouted for a selfie in front of a whitewashed church and Made In Chelsea star Millie Mackintosh, who dispensed with clothes entirely and Instagrammed a picture of herself naked in a Mykonos spa.
aNdnow Usain Bolt, who has spent the past two weeks celebrating his retirement from international athletics, has joined the fray, being hosed down by friends with bottles of champagne to mark his 31st birthday. Cheers!
In the past few years, Mykonos has taken over from Ibiza as the summer’s chief party island for the super-rich.
So we have the likes of supermodels Bella hadid and heidi Klum, singer Nicole Scherzinger and Kate Moss’s little sister Lottie Moss mingling on Paradise Beach, eating sushi at the island’s outpost of the swanky Japanese restaurant Nobu and knocking back champagne (£130,000 for a 30-litre bottle of Armand de Brignac Methuselah Midas) at Nammos, the island’s glitziest beach-bar.
I went to Mykonos for a colleague’s wedding last summer. Private jets were parked at the airport, helicopters buzzed like wasps and girls in bikinis raced around on quad bikes, darting from designer fashion boutiques like Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga to heaving bars along the cobbled streets. It’s hogarth’s Gin Lane — the Mediterranean chapter.
But there is a calmer side in the more sheltered parts of the island. My colleague was married in a small white chapel overlooking a peaceful beach called Agios Sostis on the quieter, northern coast. The ceremony was followed by a sunset dinner overlooking the inky sea.
It was a world away from the celebrity hordes pouring champagne over one another and broadcasting their shenanigans to the world. It was a slice of old-fashioned Mykonos — undisturbed, unadorned, untouched. And not a single plate was smashed.