There's a sub-genre I enjoy, I guess you'd call it Stories About The Obsessive Behaviour of Rich, Creative People. Karl Lagerfeld is normally involved. It might also be called Things I Might Do If I Were Rich, And Creative.
There's a choice example in last week's New Yorker, a profile of legendary printer Gerhard Steidl.
Two samples:
"Steidl’s place at the head of the table is indicated by a stack of cream-colored notecards, made to his specifications at a nineteenth-century paper mill on the west coast of Sweden. He uses notecards to annotate his conversations, and writes on them with Staedtler pens, which he keeps, lined up, in the breast pocket of the white lab coat he wears while working. All of Steidl’s choices are refined. “He has the best paper scissors on earth,” Singh told me."
and
"Steidl is driven to Paris dozens of times a year. He makes the trip in a Volkswagen Phaeton in which the passenger-side seats have been replaced by a bed, as in the first-class cabin of an aircraft. He drinks a glass of good red wine before leaving Paris, and is asleep, sandwiched between two pillows, by the time the driver has reached the periphérique. “I wake up when the car gets off the highway—I see the Burger King sign, and I know I have arrived in Göttingen,” he told me. “Not one minute earlier.”
These stories are not just about self-indulgence. They're about obsession and attention to detail, I suspect the riches are a product of that obsession not the cause of it. Beyond a certain point they feed each other.
Gerhard Steidl Is Making Books An Art Form
(Karl Lagerfeld is involved)