France's most expensive beach town is fuller and pricier than ever — and longtime visitors say the brand takeovers and content crews have cost it the very thing people came for.
The complaint about St. Tropez is not that it has stopped being beautiful. It is that it has become difficult to experience as anything other than a set.
The town spent the 1950s converting itself from a Provençal fishing village into the definitive playground of the international jet set, and it has traded on that image ever since. What has changed over the last decade is who the image is now for. As Instagram, TikTok and luxury travel marketing grew together, places prized for exclusivity became valuable primarily as backdrops.
The critique circulating on social media this summer is less about influencers as individuals than about volume and behavior. One widely shared post from Kiki Astor described creators descending on attractive locations to strip them for content and leaving them worn out — a framing that clearly touched a nerve on travel forums and Reddit threads devoted to mourning the "old" St. Tropez.
The economics have not cooperated with the nostalgia. A recent France Magazine survey put St. Tropez at the top of the country's most expensive beach destinations, with average nightly hotel rates well clear of rival coastal towns, while luxury real estate on the peninsula continues to set records as international buyers move in.
Layered on top of the crowds is the branding. Every summer the European luxury houses stage increasingly elaborate beach club takeovers and seasonal pop-ups along the Riviera — monogrammed loungers, branded paddleboards, immersive installations from Dior, Gucci, Armani, Jacquemus and Loewe. The result is a circuit of photo locations that repeats across the continent, producing a checklist rather than a destination. One commenter summed up the mood by describing the queue of influencers waiting for coffee at Dior as insane, and decamping to La Croix Valmer on the quieter side of the peninsula.
Not everyone is unhappy. For visitors who came specifically for the spectacle, the town has arguably improved: the clubs are bigger, the yachts are larger, and the odds of a celebrity sighting are excellent. Alix Earle spent much of this summer documenting yacht life to a very large audience. The Côte d'Azur remains a fixture for Leonardo DiCaprio, Victoria Beckham, Katy Perry and Kate Moss, and demand shows no sign of cooling — one visitor this summer reportedly offered a bouncer €500 for proximity to DiCaprio.
For the people who have been coming for decades, the loss is harder to price. A commenter on Astor's post compared returning to the Riviera to revisiting a childhood home and discovering it was always a small house — the place is unchanged, but the thing you remembered was never really about the architecture.