The Venice wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, witnessed from afar, is many things. It is, of course, a public commitment between two individuals who, whatever else one can say, certainly do seem to be deeply in love. (The Amazon founder’s radical reshaping of his public image in the years since he took up with the helicopter pilot and former broadcast journalist certainly speaks to a certain type of ardor.) It’s a Sun Valley-style confab for the global ruling class, particularly among the tech industry, of which Bezos is a leader, and the entertainment industry, of which Sánchez would certainly like to be. (Guests include Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Tom Brady, Kim Kardashian, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, to name a few.) And it’s a show of force for a certain oligarchical style of personal display that’s in such transparent bad taste that the concept of “bad taste” no longer applies. Bowled over by the force of Bezos and Sánchez’s self-belief, one can merely look on in awe.
Consider, for instance, the couple’s wedding invitation, a document sent to attendees that, the New York Times reported, were also to include “Mick Jagger, Jay-Z & Beyoncé, Eva Longoria, Gayle King and Jewel.” (Good for Jewel!) Bedecked with stars, feathers, birds, butterflies, and dragonflies — a possible homage to the insect protagonist of Sánchez’s unfortunately titled children’s book “The Fly Who Flew to Space” — the neon-colored card manages to make a wedding in the city that has inspired artists for centuries look like a meetup at the mall store Claire’s. The text of the invitation indicates that the happy couple will be making donations to protect a city that is actively sinking. It’s a well-meant donation that will hopefully have impact, and also a bandage on a self-inflicted wound: You don’t need to work around the bad optics of hosting a massive wedding on the site of an ecological emergency if you make the choice to get married somewhere else.
But Bezos’ wealth has long allowed him to create his own reality; the generally positive and enthusiastic coverage of the Sánchez-led all-female flight into the nearest reaches of outer space, earlier this year, indicated that to be true. (Chattering-class mockery of the project tended to land on poor Katy Perry, who’d said her presence on the Blue Origin craft meant that she would “put the ‘ass’ in ‘astronaut.’” Perry, at her peak of fame a PR-savvy operator, ought to have known better, the thinking seemed to go. But Sánchez was just being herself — she can’t help it!)
Sánchez received contemptuous sneers from an anonymous fashion publicist, speaking for their industry, in a recent New York profile. Her revenge was to show up for a pre-wedding gathering of guests in couture Schiaparelli whose outrageously tight corset and elaborately embroidered bustline seemed intended to emphasize both old-school Euro craftsmanship and a certain disproportionate extremity in Sánchez’s own taste. Understatement might have been on the menu back when Sánchez’s dearest dream was to be a sunny, relatable panelist on “The View.” Now, though, she’s been to outer space, and seen a whole new angle on the planet over whose economy her soon-to-be spouse strides. Maybe going big hardly even feels like going big anymore.
To be angry or frustrated with a self-consciously out-there display of wealth, at a moment when attention to the growing gap between the one percent and the rest, is both natural and missing the point. What Bezos and Sánchez are doing, in the end, is a flex; not being elected officials, they’re not dependent on us liking them, and the American people have lately proven their willingness to tolerate let-them-eat-cake ostentatiousness in our political leaders anyway. It likely matters little to Sánchez and Bezos if you, the person reading Daily Mail coverage over your office lunch, think they’re “tacky” — it takes a lot of money, as the saying goes, to look this cheap, and inviting every celebrity they could think of to a city descending into the murk for one huge party is, at least, proof that they’ve made it.
That — the idea that this wedding cements the ambitions of a tech mogul who’s long craved the attention of the entertainment industry and a fringe entertainment industry figure who’s sure she could be a thought leader — gets at the one other thing this wedding is. Yes, it’s a display of love and of a shared interest in pushing luxury to the limits of reason and then beyond it; yes, it’s a staging-ground for various celebrities to display both their closeness to the parties in question and their own willingness to get a bit sartorially nutty. It’s also, from the beckoning-in of tangentially-related celebrities who have been called to pay tribute to the show-of-force takeover of an entire European city, a royal wedding. As for what Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez actually rule? Your attention, for one thing, and mine.