As the highlight of New York’s social calendar and an extravaganza dubbed the ‘Fashion Oscars‘, the annual Met Gala is the moment when celebrities really dress to impress and fashion fans either gasp with delight or recoil in horror.
It’s invitation-only and for those first-time invitees, inclusion on the guest list — compiled by Anna Wintour, US Vogue’s formidable editor-in-chief and the Gala’s chair — traditionally signifies nothing less than appointment to the upper rungs of American society.
With entry to the charity ball, in aid of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, costing $75,000 and $350,000 for a table (unless you’re sponsored by a brand), you will probably already be rich. But now you’re officially cool and stylish, too. You have arrived. However, this year’s event taking place on Monday will be scrutinised with particular interest, since it is expected to see the debut of a woman whose fashion choices have not exactly been regarded as the height of sophisticated elegance.
Lauren Sanchez — the pneumatic 54-year-old fiancee of Amazon multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos — is instead notorious for wearing the sort of ensembles that leave little of her gym-toned, surgically-enhanced assets to the imagination.
So notorious in fact that Wintour, despite only a few months ago giving Bezos and Sanchez a glowing (and, no doubt, closely managed) photospread in Vogue, is suspending her usual laissez-faire policy on the dress code: she has reportedly decreed that the soon-to-be Mrs Bezos can come to the ball only if Wintour has a say in what she wears.
Anna Wintour has said that Jeff Bezos’s fiancee Lauren Sanchez (pictured) can only come to the Met gala if the Vogue queen has a say in what she wears
An insider recently told Wintour’s (pictured) biographer Amy Odell that the famously exacting editor knows Sanchez has ‘poor taste’
Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos at the 2023 Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills
An insider recently told Wintour’s biographer Amy Odell that the famously exacting editor knows Sanchez has ‘poor taste’, and so is personally helping her select a dress.
‘Anna doesn’t always get personally involved in what guests wear,’ wrote Odell, adding that she was working with Sanchez to choose between custom designs by the classically stylish Oscar de la Renta and two other as-yet-unnamed designers.
Given that this is a bash to which actor Jared Leto last year came dressed as fashion designer Karl Lagerfield’s cat and to which even Sanchez’s reality TV star friend Kim Kardashian — hardly Coco Chanel herself — has already been an attendee with no such reported caveat, it amounts to a resounding declaration of no confidence.
Yet Wintour surely has a point. In January, Sanchez stepped out in Milan wearing a sheer Dolce & Gabbana black lace dress that exposed her backside and prompted US broadcaster Megyn Kelly to complain that she ‘looks like a hooker’. She advised Sanchez: ‘Try to be a little classy. Must everything be an exposé of your obviously over-enhanced assets?’
She was again mocked when she wore another sheer dress to the Vanity Fair Oscars party which gave new meaning to the phrase ‘plunging neckline’ and appeared to be on the verge of a wardrobe malfunction.
Last month, Sanchez again turned heads in all the wrong ways when she squeezed into a figure-hugging red lace and satin dress for a state dinner for Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida at the White House that critics complained made her look — not for the first time — like a sex club hostess.
The $2,300 low-cut corset gown by designer Rasario was variously described by online commenters as ’embarrassing’, ‘totally inappropriate’ and the ‘trashiest thing’ ever seen at a black-tie White House dinner.
The Met Gala guest list is technically secret until the night, and Sanchez may yet take umbrage at this alleged slur on her taste and not come. But it would be a pity as this year’s ‘The Garden of Time’ theme seems tailor-made for her.
The title comes from a short story by British writer J. G. Ballard about a super-rich aristocratic couple whose decadent, luxurious life is threatened by an unruly mob approaching their walled estate bent on trouble.
If that couple sounds more than a little like 60-year-old Bezos — who, with an estimated fortune of $195 billion, is vying with Elon Musk to be the world’s second richest person — and his pouting chatelaine, it’s also true that they, too, have no shortage of people who bear them little goodwill.
Derided by New York’s best- known restaurateur as ‘absolutely revolting’, accused of plagiarism over a children’s book she’s written, having the first feature film she produced scrapped and now discovering that even friend Anna Wintour apparently thinks she’s a walking sartorial disaster — it hasn’t been the smoothest of rides for Sanchez as she seeks to climb to the highest branches of the American celebrity tree.
She no longer wants to just be the busty, pouty helicopter pilot for whom the Amazon boss ditched his wife five years ago.
It surely doesn’t help matters that Bezos, who is somewhat lacking in charisma, has never exactly been Mr Popular. This is the person who, aged ten, reduced his grandmother to tears by calculating how many years she had lost by smoking, and whose company, Amazon, has been named the world’s worst employer by trade unions.
Wintour, US Vogue’s formidable editor-in-chief and the Gala’s chair, compiles its guest list
Last month, Sanchez again turned heads in all the wrong ways when she squeezed into a figure-hugging red lace and satin dress for a state dinner for Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida at the White House
He also stands accused of founding a rapacious online retailer that has been blamed for laying waste to high streets across the world through predatory price-cutting.
And his reputation hardly improved when it was revealed in January 2019 that the supposedly committed family man was having an affair with Sanchez, a neighbour and wife of his close friend and business partner Patrick Whitesell, with whom she has two children as well as a son from a previous relationship.
O n the same day that the news broke, Bezos announced his divorce, after 25 years, from wife MacKenzie, the mother of his four children.
Ever since, Bezos — who stepped down as Amazon’s chief executive in 2021 — has been devoting much of his time to ostentatiously travelling the globe with Sanchez, ringing the changes from his fleet of private jets with a £400 million super-yacht whose bosomy carved figurehead is clearly based on her.
She says she ‘blacked out’ when Bezos proposed with a 30-carat diamond ring aboard the yacht last May.
Although she’s regained consciousness now, it’s clear that other men don’t share her proud fiance’s appreciation of a woman who, acid-tongued observers insist, looks nothing like she used to.
Last month, Keith McNally, British owner of a string of successful New York restaurants and Manhattan’s most acerbic restaurateur, declared in a frenzied post on social media that Sanchez was ‘absolutely revolting’ — in capital letters.
‘What an ugly and f***ing SMUG-LOOKING couple they make,’ he observed. ‘Is this what having 1,000 billion dollars does to people?’
Celebrities including model Chrissy Teigen and writer Jessica Seinfeld, wife of comedian Jerry, leapt to her defence and rounded on McNally.
Then, days later, magazine editor Joanna Coles gave Sanchez her own vote of confidence by announcing — on taking over tabloid news website The Daily Beast — that she was hiring a reporter who will solely focus on Sanchez as, ‘I’ve never seen anybody land on the radar of Americans as fast and as brilliantly as Lauren Sanchez. Everyone I know is completely fascinated by her . . . It’s wonderful to see someone who’s having such an unapologetically good time.’
That’s certainly one way of looking at it — and that level of gush will no doubt help secure an interview — but many Americans don’t feel nearly so enraptured by Bezos and Sanchez shamelessly flaunting their vast wealth and questionable taste. The pair ran into a firestorm of abuse on social media late last year when Vogue ran that glossy spread on them.
Super-flattering photos taken by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz showed Bezos, once Silicon Valley’s nerd king, flexing his biceps and wearing a cowboy hat, T-shirt and jeans as Sanchez draped herself over him as they sat in a Jeep.
Other lavishly-shot pictures showed her posing moodily alongside some of her fiance’s possessions including a huge ranch in Texas and a giant rocket ship she plans on taking into space next year with a select group of women.
In an interview headlined ‘Lauren Sanchez Is Looking to the Future’ she preposterously insisted the couple’s lives are ‘pretty normal’ as she described having a $200,000 bidding war with her friend Kim Kardashian over a charity auction dress.
Vogue noted the Bezos yacht was the ‘largest in the world’, and that Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates and Queen Rania of Jordan were guests at their engagement party. Sanchez, Vogue enthused, had helped transform Bezos from ’round-shouldered online bookseller to Tony Stark titan of industry’.
From Melinda Gates (ex-wife of Bill) to Priscilla Chan, aka Mrs Mark Zuckerberg, and indeed MacKenzie Scott, the former Mrs Bezos, the wives of Silicon Valley billionaires have a history of avoiding the spotlight. Or at least the glitzy spotlight of events such as the Met Gala and the Oscars (as her film aspirations indicate) which Lauren now has in her sights, although they don’t mind exploiting their fame for more philanthropic or intellectual ends.
It’s clear that other men don’t share Sanchez’s proud fiance’s appreciation of a woman who, acid-tongued observers insist, looks nothing like she used to
Sanchez is gearing up instead to be Tech Spouse 2.0, the perfect accompaniment to an ageing internet mogul who has completely reinvented his own image with gym sessions and a wardrobe revamp
Sanchez is gearing up instead to be Tech Spouse 2.0, the perfect accompaniment to an ageing internet mogul who has completely — and often hilariously — reinvented his own geeky image with sessions in the gym and a wardrobe revamp.
S anchez is clearly aware she has an image problem, according to a new book about Bezos by Wall Street Journal reporter Dana Mattioli which says Sanchez approached Trump spin doctor Kellyanne Conway at a 2020 party and begged for help.
‘You’ve had a lot thrown at you. How do you handle it?’ pleaded Sanchez. ‘Please, have you looked in the mirror?’ Conway told her ‘People are jealous of you . . . because you’re dating him.’
Lauren has since dipped her manicured toe into philanthropy. In March, she became vice-chair of the Bezos Earth Fund financing research on biomanufacturing and climate change. The couple have also instituted a $100 million Courage and Civility Award for people serving the community. Winners have so far included Dolly Parton and actress Eva Longoria.
She also wants to be a player in Hollywood. But last week, it was revealed that Sanchez’s self-funded, $2 million feature film had been abandoned.
Entertainment industry website Puck reported that the ‘inexperienced’ Sanchez had been an ‘infrequent and — to some, unwelcome — presence’ during filming of the psychological thriller, and had made diva-like demands such as landing her helicopter on set.
It added: ‘Suffice to say, Sanchez didn’t make many friends by maintaining a relatively lavish trailer while others were sweltering.’
A popular avenue for any rising U.S. star (including, of course, the Duchess of Sussex) is to produce a children’s book. But even this modest endeavour has landed Sanchez in difficulty.
Last week, she was sent a cease-and-desist legal letter by an ex-yoga teacher, Alanna Zabel, who accuses Lauren of copying her ideas for Sanchez’s first tome, The Fly Who Flew To Space.
While it’s unclear how true her claims are, Zabel says she shared details of her self-published book, Dharma Kitty Goes To Mars, with the couple in 2022 in a bid to team up with two of their charities, the Bezos Earth Fund and Bezos Academy. There have obviously been challenges, but no one can doubt Sanchez’s determination, nor — given she won the heart of one of the richest men in the world — that she’ll one day succeed.
For now at least, she can take some comfort from the newspaper USA Today this week hailing her as a ‘fashion icon’ for her ‘evolving style’, publishing a gallery of her red carpet hits as proof.
One suspects that whatever Anna ‘Nuclear’ Wintour approves for Lauren’s Met Gala debut will be a little less eye-popping.