All those placards and protest banners have got it wrong. We don’t want to eat the rich. We’d much prefer simply to snack on them. Who needs to sit through seven hours of White Lotus to understand that the wealthy are boring and beautiful and fascinating and ghastly? You can get all that in 30 seconds on Instagram, if you know where to look, and still have room for a tweet or two about the Sussexes before breakfast.
A case in point, if the comments sections of a certain corner of TikTok are to be believed, is that of Countess Lara Cosima Henckel von Donnersmarck—a 20-year-old European aristo and Parsons student who ticks certain very Zeitgeist-y boxes (nepo baby: check) while beautifully defying others. This is not “quiet luxury” or “stealth wealth”: it’s boom-box couture, clown-face riches.
The Dior intern’s TikTok account, which has over 790,000 followers and has racked up 13.5 million likes, takes the highly popular “Get Ready with Me” trend of the social platform and adds a sort of Marie Antoinette aloofness. Whereas some influencers attempt to be relatable or practical or contemporary in their GRWM outfit choices, Lara Cosima has decided, rather wonderfully, to go the other way. Her most popular video, at around 11 million views, shows the countess trying on a golden gown for “a ball in Spain” while twirling against the backdrop of her rococo Parisian apartment—half film set, half cake, by the looks of things.
Her other hit videos have captions such as “becoming friends with ur security detail” and “opening the bal des debutantes with my dad.” All an absolute riot, no doubt—a bit like the actual riots recently taking place on the Parisian streets outside. Let them wear Chanel!
That 11-million-view video was posted in mid-June 2023—and after the initial chew-and-savor phase came the inevitable moral spittooning. Soon, TikTok sleuths had put two and two together and got fünf—theorizing that Lara Cosima’s wealth might in fact stem from a particularly horrendous period in German history.
“Since I posted that video there’s been a lot of interest in my family history—especially my Donnersmarck ancestors who were alive during World War Two,” Lara Cosima took to TikTok to explain in September. (Though fully German, the countess speaks in a perfect Gossip Girl drawl.) “There were two of them — neither of them having remotely anything to do with the Nazis,” Lara Cosima says before going on to explain that Internet activists had confused her ancestors with those of another Donnersmarck line: principally a “Guido Otto Donnersmarck,” who, the trolls claim, “offered his forest workers’ assistance to German soldiers on their way to Poland.”
Let them wear Chanel!
Lara Cosima then goes on to explain that she is about as closely related to Guido Otto’s descendants as George W. Bush is to Barack Obama, or as she is to King Charles—which, knowing the incestuous bloodlines of the Euro aristocracy, may not imply quite the distance she’s after.
Instead, Lara Cosima reassures us, the utter opulence of her lifestyle is simply “a result of my dad’s work”—nepo baby, then, not Nazi baby. Dad, in this case, happens to be Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, a film director and descendent of the noble Austro-German House of Henckel von Donnersmarck. Florian is perhaps best known in the U.S. for directing The Tourist (2010), starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, while in 2006 he won the Oscar for best foreign-language film for the Stasi-themed thriller The Lives of Others.
In 2019, a New Yorker profile of the director explained how the Henckel von Donnersmarcks in fact had their fortunes and castles ruined by the erection of the Iron Curtain, while Florian himself described his family as “too cultured to have been Nazis.”
One senses that the Henckel von Donnersmarcks have been batting away these sorts of questions for a long time. A top comment on one of Lara Cosima’s recent posts, with more than 8,604 likes, reads, “I thought I recognized Miss Blood Money.”
This is not the first backlash the countess appears to have endured. An Elle profile from August explains how she had originally begun TikToking in 2022—“but when one of her outfits went viral on social media (and not for its virtues), she quit for a year.” This “feedback,” the author writes, “ultimately helped her hone her style.” Or, put another way, “bullying worked,” according to Lara Cosima.
So, this past summer, we are duly informed, Lara Cosima began her “redemption era”—a comeback climaxing at Le Bal des Débutantes at the end of November. The “diamond in the tiara” of the ball, as Tatler put it, was very much Lara Cosima herself, who danced the opening waltz with her father in a room lit like a mid-budget second wedding.
Though it all sounds squarely pre-guillotine, Le Bal dates only to the 1990s and is as much a shoulder-rubber and charity fundraiser as a society coming-out party. However, the gathered fathers still present their daughters to a cast of spotty young “cavaliers,” clad in ill-fitting white-tie. “It’s kind of like a teenage Met Gala,” Lara Cosima herself explained on TikTok. Or perhaps My Super Sweet 16: The Deposed Monarchy Special, your third-favorite industrialist’s third-favorite daughter’s third-favorite party.
Struggling to choose between couture dresses by Chanel and Elie Saab in the lead-up to the event, Lara Cosima later told Elle, “That’s the most important thing in fashion to me: it’s not just something beautiful, but it can also bring attention to a lot of important issues.” The orphans of Africa will be thrilled to learn she plumped for Gaultier.
The confection floats on untroubled. A post from December shows Lara Cosima and a friend apparently getting ready for a Friday night out in Paris. Alongside the flutters of praise (“The dress, the room, everything is perfect,” says one), a single comment has been liked more than 36,000 times. “[I’m] watching this from district 12,” it says—a reference to a poverty-stricken zone in the Hunger Games universe where a small cabal of gaudy plutocrats rules over the huddled masses while wearing ridiculous outfits. On another post, a commenter is slightly less subtle. “Have you heard of Robespierre?” they ask—to which the answer must surely be: I just loved his fall collection.
Joseph Bullmore is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the editor of Gentleman’s Journal in London