At the £20m launch party for the Atlantis Hotel in Dubai in November last year, Richard Branson described the event as “probably the last party of the decade”. With the credit crunch starting to bite, many were inclined to agree. But fast-forward a year and Sol Kerzner, the owner of the Atlantis, was doing it again, spending £15m to fly 1,500 guests to Casablanca for the launch of the Mazagan Beach Resort. Among the belly dancers and fire-eaters were women on stilts wearing dresses made entirely of fresh flowers, while trained monkeys handed out Moroccan roses to all the ladies — Lindsay Lohan, Yasmin Le Bon and Naomi Campbell among them.

Despite Branson’s prediction, 2009 has been a year where such extravagance is not only commonplace among the super-rich, but happening at unprecedented levels. Richard Caring, the club and restaurant supremo, spared no expense when organising his son Ben’s wedding in September. There, 400 guests, in a grand ballroom built on top of the lake in his Hampstead garden, ate beluga caviar from ice plates as they watched performances by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Bolshoi Ballet, flown in specially for the evening.

Not to be outdone, the retail billionaire Philip Green has thrown at least three £1m-plus parties in the past year. In June, Green paid Lionel Richie a reported £1m to perform for friends including Kate Moss, Jamie Hince and Geri Halliwell at a bash at the Dorchester, where guests entered by walking up a £200,000 white carpet. Then, for his wife Tina’s birthday in August, he flew close friends to Capri, where they were serenaded by Julio Iglesias on board the £20m family yacht, Lionheart. Last month, he and Tina threw the party of the year for Simon Cowell’s 50th birthday. Guests were served by waiters wearing Cowell masks and ate soup with his name spelt out in pasta shapes. The entertainment reached new depths of decadence when dancers in sex-toy and vagina costumes cavorted on stage, before a naked woman came out to perform a reverse striptease, where she dressed herself by producing clothes from inside her.

It wasn’t only Green flying friends to exotic places. Fawaz Gruosi, founder of the jeweller de Grisogono, invited several hundred of his closest friends (and plenty of models) to Sardinia in August for a weekend bash, catered for by Cipriani restaurant.

In Ibiza this summer, the bold and the beautiful showed no sign of slowing down. While residents such as Jade Jagger and Bruce Parry threw wild parties at their farmhouses, it was the banking heir Max Gottschalk’s louche bash that was the talk of the island. He put aside his business worries as scantily clad dancers gyrated on a specially constructed platform over his expansive swimming pool, while superstar record spinners Swedish House Mafia and Pete Tong DJ’d. A barefoot Sienna Miller was spotted in the middle of the dancing throng. And when Raffles nightclub held its party on the island (costing a six-figure sum), revellers including James Blunt, Rosamund Pike and Amber Le Bon were treated to a five-course dinner with vintage champagne, before watching a fireworks show from beds on the beach.

Over in Cannes, the decks of the yachts in the harbour were creaking under the weight of dancing celebrities in town for the May film festival. The Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen threw his annual A-List blowout aboard one of his mammoth yachts, but just to reach the tender to take you there involved getting past two levels of security. (There was yet another security cordon when you arrived at the ship, Tatoosh.)

Back in the old port, the yacht of the banker’s wife Diana Jenkins served as an almost permanent after-party for celebrity revellers. Staff worked round the clock to cater parties where Jenkins and David Furnish would rarely finish dancing before 5am. Paris Hilton popped in a couple of times to dance on the chairs, Steve Jones and Hayden Panettiere canoodled on the deck, while James Blunt was spotted taking girls below deck for a “tour” of the ship. Inevitably, the super-rich feel freer to indulge themselves when they are afloat, away from the prying eyes of paparazzi.

A new service, Dreambrokers, is launching to cater specifically to the whims of the world’s wealthiest sailors. It will have to go far to match the yacht-owner cruising the British Virgin Islands this summer who decided he fancied a bit of Kobe beef for dinner. The meat was flown from Japan to Miami, then on a connecting flight to Antigua, then taken via a boat to St Kitts, and then helicoptered to the yacht. Never mind the carbon footprint, the cost of dinner was stratospheric.

Meanwhile, big philanthropists such as Arpad Busson, Ella Krasner and Denise Rich filled their annual charity events on word of mouth alone. Last month, Rich held a dinner for 300 at the Palais de Versailles, while in May the amfAR Cinema Against Aids dinner (one of the most expensive charity dos, with top seats selling for thousands of euros) was held at the Hotel du Cap in Cannes, and featured a performance from Annie Lennox, a speech from Bill Clinton and a charity auction where two kisses from Robert Pattinson, the star of Twilight, went for $20,000 each. And if you know the right people (and have the cash), £20,000 will get you one of only 20 seats for a fund-raising dinner at Clarence House with the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall later this month.

Credit crunch? Some people never even noticed.

Times recommends

• Live fashion advice: how to dress for party season
• The A-Z of winter style rules
• Could safe havens prevent teenage stabbings?