The true cost of the monarchy, revealed | The Royals

ZARA 50TH ANNIVERSARY

Zara at 50: how the brand rose to the top – and what it’s doing to stay there

 

As fashion empire hits middle age, it’s cutting costs and closing stores, shifting to larger outlets and new products

 

Sarah Butler

Sat 5 Jul 2025 10.00 CEST

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025/jul/05/zara-at-50-how-the-brand-rose-to-the-top-and-what-its-doing-to-stay-there

 

In Arteixo, northern Spain, workers are putting the final touches to a gigantic white box of a building, fixing windows and planting greenery in the new global headquarters of the fashion brand Zara, which turned 50 this year.

 

The site, complete with a private high street where the retailer will test out its latest store concepts, is not far from the small store on the corner of a nondescript street in the centre of nearby La Coruña where, in 1975, Amancio Ortega opened his first fashion store.

 

From those humble beginnings grew Inditex, a fashion empire that today boasts seven brands including Zara, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Pull & Bear and Oysho. It has more than 5,500 stores in 98 countries and an online presence in 116 more – from the US and UK to Zimbabwe and Uzbekistan.

 

Zara, which has been worn by the Princess of Wales, Taylor Swift and, controversially, Melania Trump, was the first brand in the group and remains by far the biggest. It is budget friendly but not super cheap, drawing in shoppers with affordable tailoring and on-trend items, especially dresses – most famously the 2019 polka dot viral dress.

 

Ortega, who at 89 is still regularly seen at the head office chatting with staff, was a local clothing manufacturer who had worked his way up from being a delivery boy at a shirtmakers when he opened his first shop. He is now the 12th richest person in the world according to Forbes, with a net worth of about $120bn (£880m).

 

More than 160,000 people work for the company he founded, more than 5,000 of them at the Inditex HQ in Arteixo, a complex which includes the new, soon to be opened Zara head office. Together they helped ring up sales of €38.6bn (£33.3bn) last year and profits of €7.6bn.

 

As the Guardian was given rare access to the building’s gleaming white corridors, staff whizzed past on electric scooters or even bikes to navigate the vast site.

 

But as the company hits middle age, Inditex faces challenges. Sales growth slowed to 4.2% in the most recent quarter, a slowdown from 10.5% in the previous quarter.

 

Like many other retailers, the company is reducing its overall store estate – with a net 136 stores closed in the past year.

 

The slowdown comes only a few years after a changing of the guard at Inditex, when the founder’s daughter Marta Ortega Pérez stepped in as chair while former lawyer and banker Óscar García Maceiras became chief executive.

 

Local boy García Maceiras, who joined in 2021 from Spain’s Banco Santander, is seen as an outsider with quite a lot to prove.

 

When we meet in his spacious office, the conservatively dressed CEO, in tight-fitting blue suit and shirt, is bullish about the company with which he shares a 50th birthday year. “We remain very confident in our capability to keep on growing,” he says.

 

While store numbers are reducing globally, the amount of space devoted to Inditex fashions around the world will increase by 5% this year as it shifts to ever larger outlets.

 

In the UK, for example, next month Zara will reopen its doors at Manchester’s Trafford Centre with a store that is 40% bigger than before, while Pull & Bear is doubling the size of its outlet there. Meanwhile, Bershka will open its first store in Manchester.

 

Bershka is also opening a new store in Glasgow this summer while Stradivarius, another Inditex brand, is opening there and near Newcastle later this year. The group is also looking for a site for The Apartment, a new concept that combines premium Zara clothing and , in a store laid out like a stylish influencer’s home. Right now there are only three in the world – in La Coruña, Paris and Madrid.

 

The UK expansion comes despite retailers’ warnings that a rise in taxes might depress new store openings and hit jobs.

 

“We keep on considering the UK a very relevant and attractive market,” García Maceiras says.

 

Similarly in the US, Inditex’s second-biggest market, he says the company will flex its supply base, which includes factories in 50 countries, to deal with whatever tariffs the Trump administration settles on. Inditex doesn’t use factories in the US or Americas at present – but García Maceiras doesn’t rule it out for the future.

 

Part of the challenge for well-established fashion brands is the rise of online fast fashion specialists Shein and its fellow Chinese-founded digital behemoth Temu.

 

García Maceiras shrugs off such upstarts, saying Inditex is competing on style rather than low prices and that the fashion industry has so many players that success is not dependent on a single rival.

 

“This is a market so highly fragmented that your level of success could depend basically on your own capacity of spotting trends and executing those,” he says.

 

“The fashion sector is connected with the inspiration and aspiration, and that is something that requires permanent innovation and a permanent mindset of listening to customer needs and customer desires in order to spot trends.

 

“The idea for us going forward is to keep on innovating every day, to adapt with an enormous level of flexibility to what our customers are looking for.”

 

This is where Inditex thrives – with an almost unique model based on producing about half its stock in relatively small amounts and less than a month before it hits the shop floor. Even if something is incredibly successful, it will never be reproduced exactly again.

 

When the weather or the economic climate turns against them, most retailers must plough ahead with plans made more than six months in advance. At Inditex, every store receives a tailored assortment delivered twice a week. Local managers have considerable control over what flows into their stores – feeding back what is selling, and what customers are asking for.

 

Its new larger stores are, meanwhile, designed to house an ever broadening array of products and services. That includes more premium product to tempt in a broader range of shoppers.

 

The new stores are also given an upmarket feel, using material made from recycled ceramics that looks like marble, and split into departments to house sportswear, footwear and other growing categories.

 

Technology is also helping lower costs and aiming to improve service. In Manchester, shoppers will be able to return or pick up goods bought online with a scan of a barcode thanks to robot-operated systems, while a new gadget will automatically sort unwanted items from the changing rooms.

 

Many of the tills will automatically scan in basket loads of purchases with the use of smart radio-frequency tags.

 

The group is also trying out different kinds of services including cafes, now in a handful of stores in Spain, Japan, South Korea and China.

 

García Maceiras says constant change is the key to the business staying healthy into middle age. “This is a business in which you should take nothing for granted.”

Why 50,000 Iconic French Shirts, Intended for America, Sit in Storage

 

Why 50,000 Iconic French Shirts, Intended for America, Sit in Storage

 

Hit by President Trump’s tariffs, the Saint James clothing factory has put its inventory of striped shirts and sweaters intended for U.S. retailers in its warehouse in France.

 

By Liz Alderman

Photographs and Video by Violette Franchi

Liz Alderman, who writes about business and economics in Europe, reported from Saint-James, France.

July 3, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/03/business/trump-tariffs-st-james-fashion-france.html

 

As fabric spooled out of a bank of knitting machines in a flare of blue-and-white stripes, workers at the Saint James clothing factory in France’s Normandy region stacked them into piles and cut along patterns to make the company’s iconic Breton sailor’s shirt, worn by celebrities and adored by fans worldwide.

 

Luc Lesénécal, the company’s chief executive, surveyed an enormous workroom splashed with a rainbow of yarns. Seamstresses had recently put the finishing touches on 50,000 striped shirts and sweaters to fill orders for American stores like Nordstrom and J. Crew.

 

But his plans to ship for the fall retail season have been thwarted by President Trump’s up-and-down tariff threats. Instead of loading the merchandise into cargo planes, Mr. Lesénécal has parked his entire U.S. export in the company’s warehouse, where it will sit until Wednesday, the deadline Mr. Trump has set for Europe to come up with a deal or face tariffs of up to 50 percent.

 

“This is yo-yo politics we’ve been dealing with,” Mr. Lesénécal said, gesturing around a factory the size of three football fields, where 300 longtime employees turn out 1.5 million shirts, sweaters, scarves and coats a year. “If we don’t have visibility, we can’t move forward.”

 

He is not alone. European industry has been whipsawed since Mr. Trump announced a barrage of trade actions aimed at rewiring the global economy. America’s imposition of 10 percent tariffs on most goods from the European Union, and scattershot threats to push the rates to 20 or 50 percent, has led companies to freeze projects, seek exemptions and prepare to raise prices.

 

The European Commission, the trade bloc’s executive branch, is working to persuade Mr. Trump not to impose the harshest tariffs and is seeking a trade deal before the deadline. The bloc already faces 50 percent tariffs on its steel and aluminum, and 25 percent for cars and car parts.

 

“A trade war makes both sides of the Atlantic poorer and is just stupid,” the Belgian prime minister, Bart De Wever, said at a recent meeting of E.U. negotiators in Brussels.

 

The zigzag tariff policy, labeled “strategic uncertainty” by the U.S. Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has confounded European executives. As president of a French trade group representing businesses with a “Made in France” label, Mr. Lesénécal now spends twice as much time as he used to dealing with tariff issues.

 

When Mr. Trump first announced that he would add an extra 20 percent tariff to goods from the European Union on April 2, Mr. Lesénécal was bewildered.

 

The base tariff on the classic Saint James sailor shirt, which costs $139, was 16.5 percent. “Our tariff jumped to 36.5 percent,” he said. “One week later it went back down, but it was still 10 percent more than what we’d been paying.”

 

For now, he is absorbing the additional 10 percent to avoid alienating the 150 American retailers that sell his clothing. He can do that because Saint James is an employee-held business, without shareholder pressure.

 

But the prospect of higher tariffs looms, he said. The United States accounts for less than 10 percent of Saint James’s exports, but the higher duty would be a barrier to the U.S. market, where it has been present for 30 years.

 

“We don’t want to leave the United States,” Mr. Lesénécal said, citing a loyal clientele from Miami to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. “Our clothing is an icon of ‘Made in France,’ and Americans want the ‘art de vivre’ that it represents.”

 

Few items are as French as the striped sailor shirts and sweaters that are made in the Saint James factory, which sits in the shadow of the Mont-Saint-Michel abbey near the English Channel and traces its roots back more than 130 years. Craftsmen originally spun local wool into yarn to make fishermen’s undergarments so tightly woven that neither water nor wind could penetrate.

 

In the 1950s, they evolved into rugged sailor sweaters and peacoats made for the French Army. Saint James veered toward the public in the 1970s, emblazoning its tops with a blue-and-white striped pattern, originally used by Napoleon III to spot sailors who fell into the sea. The motif, copied by other retailers, became a cult fashion item after Brigitte Bardot and Pablo Picasso wore striped shirts everywhere. A billboard hangs on the factory floor showing Brad Pitt and George Clooney riding a motorcycle in Saint James stripes.

 

As a French heritage brand, the company could not open a factory in the United States without losing its cachet. “That would be like trying to harvest a Bordeaux wine in California,” Mr. Lesénécal said. “It would lose its essence.”

 

Recently, he and his U.S. manager, Benjamin Auzimour, crafted a letter to American clients, who place orders six months in advance. Should Europe’s deal with the United States result in a tariff higher than the 10 percent Mr. Trump recently added, the letter read, the excess would have to be borne by the retailer. “The risk is that some of them may say consumers won’t buy at higher prices,” Mr. Lesénécal said.

 

If U.S. clients balk, he might redirect the clothing in the warehouse to other countries, including Japan, where Saint James garments are popular — and there is no excess tariff.

 

A temporary loss of U.S. exports would not devastate the company, he said. But he has frozen plans to open two new U.S. stores. In addition to the risk of tariffs rising, he said, the U.S. dollar has weakened, raising his export costs.

 

“Maybe I’d rather open more stores in markets where there is greater economic security,” Mr. Lesénécal said.

 

The tariff tension has a particular resonance in Saint-James, a town whose identity has been entwined with America’s since the U.S.-led liberation of France in World War II. Among the neat stone houses, American flags flutter alongside those of Canada and Britain, which ousted German troops from Saint-James in July 1944. The Brittany American Cemetery and Memorial, with more than 4,000 white crosses commemorating fallen U.S. soldiers, is lovingly cared for by locals.

 

The Saint James factory itself sits atop a World War II airfield that belonged to the U.S. Army Air Force, marked with a warplane propeller and a plaque paying homage to the United States. So it was surprising, said the U.S. manager, Mr. Auzimour, to hear Mr. Trump claim that the European Union was created to “screw” the United States.

 

“No one here has forgotten what America did to secure Europe’s freedom,” he said, bowing his head at the American cemetery. “We remember why the European Union was really created: to prevent wars from happening again.”

 

Mr. Lesénécal is hoping that the trade war will end without major economic casualties. U.S. retailers have delayed putting in firm orders for the 2026 spring season until they have more certainty.

 

“I need to order wool and cotton thread from Australia and New Zealand,” Mr. Lesénécal said. “How can I do any of that when we don’t know what our business will be?”

 

“It’s a domino effect,” he added. “We need stability.”

 

Liz Alderman is the chief European business correspondent, writing about economic, social and policy developments around Europe.

Perfecting My First Italian Tweed | Finishing Touches with Eric Jensen |...

Preserving the old motels on Route 66.

Vintage Motels: America's Most Inspiring Motels Beautifully Restored With Respect For History Hardcover – October 14, 2025

by Ellie Seymour (Author)

 

Vintage Motels explores 40 historic motels across the USA, transformed into boutique hotels. Stunning photography and rich storytelling capture their mid-century charm and modern revival.

 

A nostalgic road trip through America’s most charming motels—revived and reimagined. Vintage Motels showcases 40 historic motels across the USA, each transformed into an inviting boutique hotel while honoring its past. Through rich storytelling and stunning photography, this beautifully designed hardcover book captures the spirit of these mid-century roadside gems. Each motel is featured across 4 to 6 pages, with a detailed narrative (500 words) and a mix of archival and contemporary images. Perfect for design lovers, travelers, and history enthusiasts, Vintage Motels is an inspiring tribute to the golden age of American road travel.

King Charles axes ‘embarrassing’ train over soaring costs

Royal train to be retired as King Charles seeks to modernise monarchy

 

Palace accounts show Treasury funding to remain at £86.3m, while duchy of Cornwall will waive some charity rents

 

Rachel Hall

Mon 30 Jun 2025 22.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/30/royal-train-to-be-retired-as-king-charles-seeks-to-modernise-monarchy

 

The royal family’s private “royal train” will be decommissioned as part of King Charles’s drive to modernise the monarchy and reduce costs.

 

The train has been used to transport members of the royal family around Britain’s railway network since 1840, but it has become increasingly costly to maintain and store. Rolling stock from the 1980s would need to be updated for modern railway networks, and two new more fuel-efficient helicopters offer a suitable alternative.

 

James Chalmers, the keeper of the privy purse, said: “The royal train, of course, has been part of national life for many decades, loved and cared for by all those involved. But in moving forward we must not be bound by the past.

 

“Just as so many parts of the royal household’s work have been modernised and adapted to reflect the world of today, so too the time has come to bid the fondest of farewells as we seek to be disciplined and forward in our allocation of funding.”

 

Chalmers said a search was under way for a long-term home for the train’s historic parts.

 

The annual royal accounts for 2024-25, published on Monday, show that the sovereign grant, which is distributed by the Treasury to fund the official duties of the royal family, will remain at £86.3m for a fourth consecutive year.

 

The grant will increase to £132m annually between 2025 and 2027. This is partly to take advantage of record offshore windfarm profits for the crown estate, which hit £1.1bn in the last financial year, and also to cover the remaining £100m costs for the final two years of Buckingham Palace’s £369m, 10-year refurbishment.

 

The accounts also show that royal travel costs increased by £500,000 to £4.7m and payroll costs were up £2m to £29.9m.

 

There was an increase in the number of travel journeys costing over £17,000, from 24 in 2023-24 to 43 in 2024-45, reaching a total expenditure of £2.7m. Travel costs for the king and queen’s state visit to Samoa cost £401,000 in public money.

 

As part of a sustainability drive, one of the royal Bentleys is now powered by biofuels, with the other due to transition this year, and a move to electric vehicles is under consideration.

 

Separate accounts also published on Monday reveal that the duchy of Cornwall, which provides Prince William with a private income of nearly £23m a year, will waive rents for grassroots groups such as wildlife trusts and the St Petrocs homelessness shelter, and reduce rent for local charities by 50%.

 

This follows a Channel 4 Dispatches and Sunday Times investigation last November into the prince’s duchy and the duchy of Lancaster estate, which found that the estates had secured rental agreements worth millions of pounds with the armed forces, the NHS and state schools.

 

Will Bax, the duchy of Cornwall’s new secretary and keeper of records, said the duchy was also looking at including schools in the community groups that would be eligible for the rent waiver. Commercial relationships with public bodies such as the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Justice will not change.

 

Bax said: “It would be remiss not to address the media scrutiny the duchy has experienced this past year. We’ve used these challenges as an opportunity to stop and reflect. Both the duke and I are clear that we want the duchy to be world-class in our approach to supporting people, communities and nature to flourish, and to realise that aim we must operate and communicate in a modern, socially minded way.

 

“It’s clear we’ve entered an era of deep change, but we change not because we disrespect our past but precisely because we do respect it.”

 

The accounts show the duchy generated profits of £22.9m, down £700,000 from £23.6m in the previous financial year.

 

The annual review for the Prince of Wales omits his income, expenditure and tax payments, a move away from the transparency implemented by Charles as the previous Prince of Wales.

Palm Beach Has Never Been Richer. The Locals Aren’t Pleased.

 

Palm Beach Has Never Been Richer. The Locals Aren’t Pleased.

 

Donald Trump’s presidency has turned this Florida island into the nightlife headquarters of MAGA, but the town’s old guard — much of it Republican — doesn’t love the new vibe.

 

By David Segal

Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.

June 22, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/business/palm-beach-trump-maga.html

 

behind elaborate landscaping. To learn what belongs to whom, and how much it cost, a guide is needed, and Dana Koch, who has been selling real estate here for 22 years, knows the area cold. He’s a veteran docent in a zoo where the creatures are billionaires and it’s difficult to see the cages.

 

“Howard and Beth Stern live here,” he said, pointing to a gate flanked by shrubbery. “This whole place, he paid about $50 million for it years ago. Now it’s worth $200 million.”

 

On it goes, an inventory of rich and famous people, a patter that rambles along, like Mr. Koch’s car, at about 10 miles an hour. Jon Bon Jovi lives there. That’s where Roger Ailes slipped in the shower and died. William Lauder built this, after buying Rush Limbaugh’s place for $155 million and tearing it down.

 

Some homes are identified by job (N.F.L. owner, sugar magnate) others by names, (Dr. Oz, Tom Ford, Charles Schwab). That lot once belonged to Jeffrey Epstein, whose place was razed. A new house is under construction, and the owners, Mr. Koch speculates, are going to apply for a new address.

 

These have been busy months for Mr. Koch, 52, who is not related to the famous Republican donors. (“Same name, different bank account.”) Palm Beach is, of course, home to President Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago. After the election in November, there was a “Trump bump,” with $100 million worth of property on Palm Beach going under contract in the span of a week. Late last year, the Fox News host Sean Hannity purchased a $23.5 million mansion in nearby Manalapan, then spent $14.9 million on an oceanfront townhouse in Palm Beach in January. (He’d previously spent $5.3 million for a townhouse here in 2021.)

 

The real surge happened later on, with sales of single-family homes rising by 67 percent in the seven months between November and May compared with the same period last year. This Trump-ward migration had little to do with Mr. Trump, real estate agents say. Most of these purchases were made by people waiting for post-election clarity about taxes, regulations and the direction of the economy, a quadrennial phenomenon.

 

But for years, Trump-adjacent celebrities and multimillionaires have been moving to the area, one of the world’s priciest ZIP codes. Sylvester Stallone, who once praised Mr. Trump as a “mythical character” at the America First Policy Institute gala on the island, spent $33.5 million for an oceanfront estate in 2020. The Citadel chief executive, Ken Griffin, a onetime Trump supporter turned critic, has reportedly spent years and $450 million snapping up 25 acres of parcels in what’s called Billionaires Row. Construction is now underway on a 50,000-square-foot home for his mother.

 

But the true economic — and cultural — impact of the second Trump administration here isn’t in the dust of construction sites. It’s the noisy influx of young Republican partyers, favor-seekers and pols who have altered the delicate social ecosystem of one of the richest enclaves in the world, home to more than 50 billionaires, according to a review of Forbes data by The Palm Beach Daily News.

 

The newcomers regard Mr. Trump as a living tourist attraction and Palm Beach as his buzzy natural habitat. They are now wedged into booths at recently opened private clubs and joyfully cannonballing into the island’s once-placid infinity pool.

 

An $85 Million Patch of Dirt

Palm Beach is an 18-mile sliver of land off the east coast of South Florida, shaped like a diver knifing through water, arms overhead. The start of its gilded age begins in 1894 when a Standard Oil partner named Henry Flagler opened the Royal Poinciana Hotel, and the area soon attracted others from his demographic who began building luxury estates of their own. This includes La Querida, a 15,000-square-foot mansion in the Mediterranean Revival style and built by an heir to the Wanamaker department store fortune. It was later sold to Joseph P. Kennedy, and remained in the family when his son became president.

 

“It was the original ‘Winter White House,’” said Mr. Koch, gesturing toward 1095 North Ocean Boulevard from behind the wheel of his BMW. He describes the properties with a mix of pride and ironic distance, a tone that says, “Sure, the numbers are insane, but isn’t this great?”

 

At one point, he drove by a single acre of undeveloped land. It looked like any other mundane patch of earth.

 

“I sold this for $85 million last year,” he said. “The dirt.”

 

Mr. Trump has played a key role in these stratospheric sums, though indirectly. During his first term, he signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which sharply limited the amount of state and local tax that could be deducted from federal taxes. For high-net-worth individuals, moving to a state with no state income tax, like Florida, was suddenly an idea worth many millions of dollars. Then came Covid.

 

“It’s not just the billionaires who moved here,” said Holly Meyer Lucas, a real estate agent in South Florida. “It’s the sons of billionaires, the daughters, the family office staff. The ripple effect has kept prices soaring for years.”

 

Mr. Koch slowed down to point out a six-bedroom house on a 10,000-square-foot plot that was acquired for $26 million in January 2021. Five months later, it was flipped for just under $42 million. Now it’s worth at least $60 million, he said.

 

It was nearly 3 p.m. by then, and a modest bit of traffic had formed in the Royal Poinciana Way Historic District, near a statue of Henry Flagler.

 

“It’s called the ‘trade parade,’” he said of the mini snarl of vehicles. “There’s been so much turnover on these properties that we have a very large number of contractors and subcontractors who start leaving this time of day.”

 

For decades, Palm Beach was a redoubt of old-money families, with names like Whitney and Harriman. When Laurence Leamer, author of “Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump’s Presidential Palace,” first arrived in Palm Beach in the mid-1990s, he didn’t understand why so few neighbors would speak to him. That December, he brought home a Christmas tree.

 

“There were all these people in black tie, on their way to their clubs, and they thought, ‘Oh, God, so Larry isn’t Jewish after all,’” he said in a phone interview. Everyone quickly became a lot friendlier.

 

A strain of country-club antisemitism had been embedded in Palm Beach for years, many residents say, and it surfaced, inevitably, in the country clubs. Only one, the Palm Beach Country Club, was dominated by Jews. This quiet prejudice reached a head in the mid-90s, when Jews began moving to the island in large numbers, to the subdued consternation of many old-line Palm Beach residents, who wondered why these people didn’t stick to Miami.

 

‘A Lot of Name-Dropping’

Enter Donald Trump. He’d bought Mar-a-Lago in 1985, and turned it into a membership club a decade later. He welcomed anyone who could afford the $25,000 initiation fee.

 

“It became an overwhelmingly Jewish club,” Mr. Leamer said. “The Jews didn’t want to admit it because they didn’t want to say they belonged to Catskill South. But that’s what it was.”

 

It was also, soon enough, the hoppingest spot on the island. At the time, Mr. Trump owned casinos and had pull with the best entertainers in the industry. Billy Joel performed. So did Tony Bennett, Celine Dion and Rod Stewart.

 

“And Trump was a wonderful host,” Mr. Leamer said. “He would stand at the door, greet everyone. He didn’t do this to change the world. He did it to make a buck. But who cares? The results were terrific.”

 

Mar-a-Lago has evolved. After 2016, and the start of Mr. Trump’s first term, locals who had flocked to it for a quality meal and a bit of networking found it was soon overstuffed with people they didn’t like. Getting a reservation for dinner became a chore. Many in the old guard quit, replaced by the new contingent, even after the initiation fee was doubled to $200,000 in 2017.

 

Today, the initiation fee is $1 million, according to Bloomberg, and the Moorish mansion is busier than ever. Those on the inside say an evening there is a singular delight.

 

“It’s a lot of name-dropping, a lot of clout chasing. Everybody’s trying to get close to the president and his inner circle,” said Melissa Rein Lively, founder and chief executive of America First PR, which she describes as America’s No. 1 anti-woke public relations firm. She visits the club from South Beach Miami.

 

The MAGA crowd at Mar-a-Lago and around the island is something new and, like everything that is new in a place that has a style of its own, not exactly welcome.

 

“It’s like new convertibles, fake nails, fake boobs, fake hair, fake eyes and big jewelry,” said Celerie Kemble, an interior decorator who grew up in Palm Beach and prefers her memories of a place all about bare feet and sand-filled cars. “These people are dressing up to get coffee.”

 

The differences are not just aesthetic. Hundreds of nonprofits descend on Palm Beach annually for what’s known as “the season,” from late November to early May. The calendar is jammed with opportunities to dress up and write a check.

 

But giving to nonpolitical local causes, like museums and hospitals, is not a high priority for many of Mr. Trump’s most ardent followers here, according to Mr. Leamer. Or for Mr. Trump. While a candidate in 2016, he shut down his personal foundation after it was revealed that he’d used money from it to settle legal disputes against his businesses.

 

He’d also spent $10,000 in foundation cash for a portrait of himself, now hanging at Mar-a-Lago. It works in a setting where Mr. Trump gets some of his most boisterous ovations. At dinners and galas at the club, Secret Service agents tell guests to stay in their seats when the president walks in and please, ladies and gentlemen, do not take any photographs.

 

This rarely works.

 

“It’s like you’re asking kids not to eat sugar, right?” said Andrés DePew, a 27-year-old entrepreneur who founded a chapter of the Conservative Political Action Conference in his native Colombia.

 

Mr. DePew has posted many images of his own from Mar-a-Lago, part of an Instagram feed crammed with parties, dinners with other young, photogenic conservatives. Clad in Ralph Lauren and Dolce & Gabbana, he looks pensive and thrilled at the same time. On one memorable night, he met Mike Tyson and Russell Brand (“Great guy”) along with Michael Flynn, a former U.S. national security adviser; Bo Loudon, an 18-year-old conservative influencer; and one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. For dinner, he likes Renato’s, an Italian restaurant that doesn’t skimp on old-world flair. On Worth Avenue — one of the great gold-plated retail strips in the world, with Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Bottega Veneta and many others — he’s a fan of Maus & Hoffman, a men’s wear store that sells an Italian hopsack blazer for $3,295.

 

Sales of clothing, jewelry and everything else behind glass here were up 30 percent from December to May compared with the same period last year, said Marianna Abbate of the Luxury PR & Hospitality Group, which polls Worth Avenue retailers. She said that the vast majority of the shoppers lived elsewhere, in the relatively less well-heeled West Palm Beach, which is just across the bridge, and points south, down I-95.

 

For revelers in search of more rarefied, less politicized air, there’s the Carriage House. It’s one of a relatively new style of private club catering to a younger audience seeking a bit of New York City’s always-on energy. The Carriage House doesn’t have a golf course or a beach. It’s a lunch, dinner and drinks venue that offers a group of people “carefully curated to reflect the Club’s sophisticated yet playful atmosphere,” as it says on the website. A membership reportedly costs $400,000.

 

Meals are extra.

 

Put Off, but Not Going Anywhere

Republicans outnumber Democrats in Palm Beach County two to one, according to data from the Supervisor of Elections. If the resistance to the MAGA tide has a spiritual home here, it is Leta Austin Foster & Daughters, a twee little store that sells bedding, children’s clothing, gifts and interior design services near Worth Avenue. In June 2020, the only person to show up at a Black Lives Matter protest in front of Town Hall was Ms. Foster, then 80. Many retailers boarded up their stores, braced for vandalism that never happened.

 

Ms. Foster’s daughter India grew up on Palm Beach, and one recent afternoon she sat on a staircase in the store and mused about the changes she’s seen over the years. On the plus side, the place has gotten younger. When she moved back in 2006, after living in San Francisco, she looked up some stats and found that less than 1 percent of the island’s population was under 35 years old.

 

“Here’s a young person,” she said to a 20ish customer, and everyone else within earshot. “This never happened before.”

 

But many of the members of Gen Z and plenty of millennials she meets grate on her. One guy told her that he is “part of the new world order.” So as gorgeous as Palm Beach is, India Foster isn’t sure she can handle the rightward tilt of the place for the rest of her life. (And at least for her business, the influx of young MAGA types has not helped the bottom line.)

 

Still, in interviews with a dozen people, only one had imminent plans to move away: a Republican.

 

J. Richard Knop was sitting in the den of his home when Mr. Koch stopped by to show what $21.9 million will now buy you on the island. (Answer: a five-bedroom, six-and-a-half-bathroom house on a 6,500-square-foot lot, with a pool and plenty of bougainvillea.) Mr. Knop’s life circumstances had changed, he said, and he has moved in with his fiancée, who lives in Northern Virginia. It will bring him closer to Washington, where he spent years as a lawyer and deal maker in the defense industry.

 

Mr. Knop was an investment banker for defense contractors, and did multimillion-dollar deals with former employees of the Defense Department, the C.I.A. and elsewhere who’d left government to create their own companies.

 

“My career was in the swamp,” he said with a smile.

 

The MAGA day-trippers notwithstanding, many Republicans here still tend to be the variety that gets their news from The Wall Street Journal, not Newsmax. Some of them are deeply put off by Mr. Trump’s assault on corporations, Mr. Leamer and others said, along with his bullying of law firms, his slamming of European allies. But they will benefit from much of the president’s agenda, like tax cuts for the rich, and their beloved island will continue to prosper, whether they like him or not.

 

“I think this town is a little bit aghast at itself,” said Ms. Kemble, the interior decorator. “But the fact is, everybody here is safe because of their money.”

 

David Segal is a business reporter for The Times, based in New York.