In the run-up to the Met Gala, it is usually the outfit choice of the likes of Beyoncé, Rihanna or some other mononymous pop icon that is the subject of pre-emptive intrigue and anticipation. But this year, the most speculated-about look was the one that would be worn by a very different kind of cultural figure: Lauren Sánchez Bezos, the 56-year-old wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
This sort of attention is inevitable when you and your multibillionaire tech bro husband dish out a rumoured $10m (£7.4m) to sponsor the biggest night in the fashion calendar. When, in advance of the event, protesters project slogans such as “If You Can Buy the Met Gala, You Can Pay More Taxes” and “Boycott the Bezos Met Gala” onto the Empire State Building. And when the same activist group reportedly places around 300 bottles of fake urine inside the Met Museum, nodding towards Amazon workers’ claims that they were forced to urinate in bottles rather than take bathroom breaks in order to meet targets (the company has denied these allegations).
So, as Sánchez Bezos, who married her newly jacked-up, Trump-courting beau in a starry ceremony in Venice last summer – and scored a special Vogue cover dedicated to her bridal gown in the process – stepped onto those famous steps leading up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Monday night, all eyes were on her.
Surely the woman who has become an emblem of super-rich more-is-more extravagance would pull out all the stops? And even if it wasn’t to one’s own personal taste, her dress would be a true spectacle, right?
Wrong. The Met steps are supposed to be a fashion playground where personality runs free, where being boring is the biggest sartorial sin – and Sánchez Bezos’s gown was, frankly, dull. The satin evening dress in navy blue, designed by the storied fashion house Schiaparelli, was centred around Sánchez Bezos’s now-signature plunging neckline; it looked a bit like the sort of thing that I might have worn to my sixth-form prom in 2010, had my budget been more couture and less Coast at Debenhams.
Art buffs may have noticed that the look, with its embellished arm straps, was a homage to one of the Met’s most famous – and notorious – portraits, Madame X by John Singer Sargent. The original painting of Madame Pierre Gautreau showed one strap slipping down the French socialite’s shoulder – and caused so much outrage that Sargent had to repaint it at a more respectable angle.
Perhaps it was intended to be some sort of comment on the furore that Sánchez Bezos and her husband’s involvement in the Met Gala has kicked up. When the news that the couple would be sponsoring the event was revealed last autumn, the backlash was swift and sharp.
After all, the gala, in spite of the celebrity circus it inspires, has always ostensibly been a celebration of creativity and artistry. And these aren’t exactly qualities that are synonymous with the Amazon business model. After the announcement, social media was awash with jokes about attendees ordering bargain outfits via next-day Prime delivery. Headlines accused Bezos of attempting to “buy” the event for his new bride.
But in the end, this boring dress was arguably a perfect symbol for the “Tech Gala”. It was a homage to something else, which felt stripped of the original’s power and creativity (AI metaphor, anyone?). It was (presumably) vastly expensive, but ultimately empty – proof that all the money in the world can’t buy you real cultural cachet, the sort of zeitgeist-moving power and influence or ineffable chic that I imagine Sánchez Bezos craves.
Podcast host and commentator Matt Bernstein put it well – albeit in devastatingly scathing fashion – in an Instagram post shared on the night. “You might be thinking: ‘it’s the Met Gala and she’s one of the richest women in the world,’” Bernstein said. “‘She should be wearing something more inventive, more creative, more boundary breaking.’ But I think this dress is perfect for her because she is none of those things.”
A savage assessment, yes, but one that is hard to disagree with if we see Sánchez Bezos as emblematic of the direction in which the fashion world appears to be moving. Tech titans such as Bezos are no longer satisfied with counting their huge piles of money; instead, they seem more desperate than ever to become culturally relevant power players, photographed mingling with celebrities and other arbiters of cool. At the same time, the fashion world seems willing to set aside any qualms about these billionaire bros, their objective lack of coolness, and (more importantly) some of their more concerning alleged business practices.
It’s a mutually beneficial, if entirely depressing, relationship. The New York Times recently described the gala as “the perfect laundromat for soulless tech money”, and Sánchez Bezos is the ideal figurehead for such an endeavour. Her husband’s business decisions and political allegiances are not necessarily her own, of course, and it is perhaps telling that she has picked up much of the vitriol that might be better directed towards him (Bezos, for whatever reason, did not walk the carpet at the Met). But her celebrity status is undoubtedly burnished by his profile and wealth.
Fame seems to have been a longtime preoccupation for Sánchez Bezos. As a TV reporter based in Los Angeles, it was her job to keep viewers updated on the ins and outs of the entertainment world. As a fixture on the guest list of starry events, she has long been friends with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, the Kardashian family and Ivanka Trump (perhaps their longstanding bond helped broker the tentative alliance between Bezos and the president, who invited the couple to his inauguration last year).
But her relationship with Bezos (she was previously married to the talent agent Patrick Whitesell, another Hollywood power player) has shot her from the margins of the celebrity world to the centre. Now, instead of doing the interviews, she is the one starring in glossy spreads for Vogue as part of her much-discussed efforts to be embraced by the fashion industry.
Just like her friend and wedding guest Kim Kardashian, Sánchez Bezos has struggled to court this notoriously unwelcoming sector. She has been given the nod of approval by Vogue tastemaker Anna Wintour; she has hired “image architect” Law Roach, the stylist behind Zendaya’s wardrobe, to mastermind her outfits; and she has sat in the front row at Paris Fashion Week with Jeff.
And in a spectacularly dissonant moment earlier this year, she posed for the cameras at the January couture shows, as Amazon announced it was about to make 16,000 job cuts (Bezos is no longer the company’s CEO, but he remains executive chair of its board, and is Amazon’s largest individual shareholder). Let them eat cake, indeed.
While Sánchez Bezos might have Wintour’s backing, other fashion industry players seem to be less enamoured of Amazon’s first couple. Met Gala staple and Moda Operandi founder Lauren Santo Domingo and designers Jonathan Anderson and Nicolas Ghesquiere of Louis Vuitton were among the figures missing on Monday. Model Bella Hadid swerved the event, after reportedly liking a social media post criticising Bezos’s involvement. In fact, arguably the chicest move a celebrity could make was not to attend.
The fact that, just days before their big event, the Bezoses appeared to be sent up in a major plotline in The Devil Wears Prada 2, one of the biggest movie releases of the year, proves that their cultural takeover still leaves a lot to be desired. In the film, Justin Theroux plays a nerdy, perma-tanned billionaire who is willing to use his money to buy his girlfriend a place in the fashion world. Billions can’t stop you from being the butt of a joke.
Will this backlash bother Sánchez Bezos? After all, this is someone who drinks her morning coffee from a mug that reads “Woke Up Sexy as Hell Again”, a habit that implies that her self-esteem is more bulletproof than most. But still, if her Met Gala moment proves anything, it’s that cool is still one thing that can’t be bought – for now.
