The world’s most expensive weddings

You can probably guess which lavish weddings of our era were high-dollar affairs.

If you guessed Lady Diana Spencer and Prince Charles, you’d be right. That cost a tidy $110 million and was dubbed the wedding of the century in July 1981. In comparison, the 2011 wedding of Princess Diana’s son William and Kate Middleton, cost $34 million, with $32 million allocated for security. His brother Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s 2018 wedding cost $40 million.

Nonetheless, if anyone can beat British royalty for big price tags, it’s billionaires from India, a country already known for its lavish weddings.

In 2018, Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani spent a cool $86 million on the wedding of his daughter Isha to Anand Piramal, entrepreneur and son of Mumbai businessman Ajay Piramal — also a billionaire. Wedding festivities were held in Italy and India. As a wedding gift, the couple received a $54 million seaside mansion. Beyonce did a private performance for an estimated 2,000 guests that, included Hillary Clinton.

Then there is the wedding of Vanisha Mittal and Amit Bhatia. Those names probably don’t ring any bells for most Westerners, but their 2004 nuptials set records. Bhatia, a British businessman, tied the knot with Vanisha Mittal, daughter of an Indian steel magnate, Lakshmi Mittal, one of the richest men in the world, in a week-long event in France that cost about $60 million. Although the 1,000 wedding guests visited several locations in France, the actual wedding was at Chateau de Vaux-le-Vicomte, a 17th-century castle located just outside Paris.

The most extravagant wedding of the 20th century was probably the 1981 wedding of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum to Princess Salama. The cost of the wedding would exceed $100 million today. The family built a stadium to hold 20,000 people for the weeklong event.