Paris
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The most notable attendees on the identical Paris Couture Week that included Rihanna, Teyana Taylor, Demi Moore and Jennifer Lawrence as visitors weren’t musicians or award-winning actors. They had been – effectively, what to name Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Bezos? “Billionaires” doesn’t encapsulate their unprecedented attain – not often are such rich figures so desperate to play out with their spoils within the highlight. Are they patrons, because the lead sponsors of this 12 months’s Met Gala? Socialites? Titans of trade who’ve now set their sights on pop cultural saturation?
This week, anyway, they’ve a brand new moniker: fashion insiders.
Bezos and his spouse, a former journalist whom he married in a glitzy three-day occasion in Venice final June, had been entrance and heart at a number of of the unique week’s prime reveals. They held arms and strolled into Schiaparelli, Sanchez Bezos in a crimson skirt go well with and clutch bag by the model. A couple of hours later, she become a pale blue go well with with an infinite fur collar for Dior, the place, after the present, she and her husband rushed backstage to pose with the home’s inventive director Jonathan Anderson and Dior CEO Delphine Arnault. (Bezos didn’t change outfits for the reveals, however stored his sun shades on at some stage in the day, together with throughout indoor photograph ops.)
It was not the primary time Bezos and Arnault have been seen rubbing shoulders: in January 2025, the couple and Arnault’s household, whose patriarch Bernard Arnault is the chairman of behemoth fashion conglomerate LVMH (which owns manufacturers together with Louis Vuitton, Dior and Givenchy), all attended Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration.
Sanchez Bezos has additionally elevated her fashion posse. She was seen sharing a car with Anna Wintour, and now appears to have a brand new consigliere for her wardrobe: the super-stylist and self-described “image architect” Law Roach, finest identified for his poetic use of classic runway seems on the crimson carpet for Zendaya, Ariana Grande and Celine Dion. On Tuesday, Roach reshared an Instagram story by Sanchez Bezos, noting that the steel-blue go well with she was pictured sporting was a classic Dior look – a powerful suggestion that they’ve paired up . Later that day, she visited the Schiaparelli couture atelier with Roach in tow.
Roach didn’t reply to a request for remark, but when he’s now styling or advising her, that might deliver Sanchez Bezos into the useless heart of the crimson carpet styling highlight – the place the place, maybe extra so than runway reveals or journal photoshoots, individuals grow to be well-known for what they put on.
Sanchez Bezos has attended quite a lot of fashion occasions earlier than, together with Balenciaga and Chanel’s ready-to-wear reveals final fall. She has additionally grow to be, all through her relationship with Bezos, a high-profile consumer, sporting a couture Schiaparelli costume as part of her June 2025 wedding ceremony festivities in Venice and a customized Dolce & Gabbana robe for the ceremony itself. Vogue celebrated her wedding with a digital cover story; the Instagram post was flooded with damaging reactions (“She’s a true example that ‘money can’t buy style and elegance,’” learn one typical remark). She attended the Met Gala in 2024, sporting a mirrored strapless robe by Oscar de la Renta. But nonetheless she appeared to wobble on fashion’s outer edges, her alternative of designer emphasizing that line, usually so effective that it’s inscrutable to these exterior it, between those that put on and admire manufacturers with broad attraction like Oscar de la Renta, and those that observe if-you-know-you-know designers.
Now, the couple seems to have reached a brand new pinnacle of fashion understanding, or at the least entry. Their appearances nearer and nearer to fashion’s energy brokers have caught many unexpectedly, notably as sentiment in direction of the world’s wealthy and highly effective is bitter at finest. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art introduced in November that the couple would sponsor the 2026 Met Gala, social media flooded with outrage. Nevermind that massive companies have sponsored the gala for many years – together with Amazon, TikTok, Apple and Yahoo. And that the couple has been criticized for spending cash on follies like area journey (for which Sanchez Bezos commissioned customized Monse area fits) and an underground clock that ticks yearly; isn’t sponsoring a museum exhibition a extra publicly useful use of their cash?
But the Met Gala, some appear to imagine, is sacred floor – an occasion that Anna Wintour, as her (unofficial but bestselling) biographer Amy Odell famous, has gone to nice pains to limit to a crowd that matches her exacting style.
Does this mark the change of fashion’s outdated guidelines? The trade went far prior to now decade to embrace liberal values: physique positivity, inclusivity, variety. The Met Gala visitor listing and Vogue covers are shrouded in mythology round who belongs and who doesn’t, even whether it is by no means fairly clear why one visitor is invited and not one other. Asked about the controversy surrounding the couple’s sponsorship of the gala by NCS last year, Wintour described Sanchez Bezos as “a great lover of costume and obviously of fashion” and stated that she could be “a wonderful asset to the museum and to the event.”
Sanchez Bezos isn’t the primary to problem the playbook. Her path, from bold TV anchor, to bodacious girlfriend on the arm of a recently-divorced tech tycoon, to spouse of one of many world’s richest males, is acquainted to anybody who watches “Gilded Age,” has learn Edith Wharton or retains up with the Kardashians. It was just a little over a decade in the past that Wintour induced an identical kerfuffle when she put Kim Kardashian on the quilt of Vogue, within the arms of her then-husband Kanye West, to mark the event of their forthcoming wedding ceremony. Melania Trump, too, was feted with a Vogue cowl when she married Donald Trump in 2005, and she too was ferried round Paris couture week by the late Vogue inventive director Andre Leon Talley and Wintour, as she recounts in her 2024 memoir.
Kardashian seems to be one thing of a template for Sanchez Bezos: she dressed her approach into fashion’s interior sanctum, partnering with former French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld to swap her Herve Leger bandage attire for Phoebe Philo coats. She has since demonstrated a maniacal dedication to fashion akin to physique horror, documenting her struggles to squeeze into Balmain latex on TV, shrinking her determine to unwalkable proportions with the intention to put on Marilyn Monroe’s sparkly costume to the 2022 Met Gala, and whittling her waist into an alarmingly tiny corset by John Galliano for Maison Margiela on the 2024 Met Gala. If she will’t place herself on the vanguard of fashion, (as Sanchez Bezos probably can not), she might go additional than anybody else to embody a designer’s most excessive visions.
Bezos and Bezos Sanchez have demonstrated no such dedication, which is maybe what makes their presence in Paris so uncomfortable to some. But in fact, in fashion, which is an trade that runs on a shoestring even when it’s handing out free champagne, all cash is inexperienced. Few manufacturers or companies might have the money to spend on a Met Gala sponsorship as we speak.
After all, a lot of the efforts fashion made to democratize itself appear to have light, suggesting they had been tendencies or fads akin to silhouettes. In the nice shakeup of designers that’s taken place over the previous two years, the vast majority of the “new” designers are white males. Models are thinner, with plus measurement ladies much less seen on runways and crimson carpets than they had been 5 years in the past. In November final 12 months, the daughter of President Trump’s AI and crypto advisor David Sacks appeared at a Paris debutante ball sporting a couture robe by Schiaparelli. Was the model betraying its fanatics? Or have high-fashion labels at all times catered to the one p.c, who are as unlikely to go an ethical purity take a look at as anybody else? Perhaps the distinction with Bezos and Sanchez Bezos is that billionaires aren’t sometimes so public – they are making an attempt to rechart the billionaire life-style as one predicated on the general public efficiency of glamour, moderately than an exegesis of privateness.
The higher query is why so many people anticipate fashion to make us really feel good, when the trade reveals us time and time once more that with the intention to survive, it should make us really feel something however.