Analysis by Rachel Tashjian
Paris — The most notable attendees at the same Paris Couture Week that included Rihanna, Teyana Taylor, Demi Moore and Jennifer Lawrence as guests were not musicians or award-winning actors. They were – well, what to call Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Bezos? “Billionaires” does not encapsulate their unprecedented reach – rarely are such wealthy figures so eager to play out with their spoils in the spotlight. Are they patrons, as the lead sponsors of this year’s Met Gala? Socialites? Titans of industry who have now set their sights on pop cultural saturation?
This week, anyway, they have a new moniker: fashion insiders.
Bezos and his wife, a former journalist whom he married in a glitzy three-day party in Venice last June, were front and center at several of the exclusive week’s top shows. They held hands and strolled into Schiaparelli, Sanchez Bezos in a red skirt suit and clutch bag by the brand. A few hours later, she changed into a pale blue suit with an enormous fur collar for Dior, where, after the show, she and her husband rushed backstage to pose with the house’s creative director Jonathan Anderson and Dior CEO Delphine Arnault. (Bezos did not change outfits for the shows, but kept his sunglasses on for the duration of the day, including during indoor photo ops.)
It was not the first time Bezos and Arnault have been seen rubbing shoulders: in January 2025, the couple and Arnault’s family, whose patriarch Bernard Arnault is the chairman of behemoth fashion conglomerate LVMH (which owns brands including Louis Vuitton, Dior and Givenchy), all attended Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration.
Sanchez Bezos has also elevated her fashion posse. She was seen sharing a car with Anna Wintour, and now seems to have a new consigliere for her wardrobe: the super-stylist and self-described “image architect” Law Roach, best known for his poetic use of vintage runway looks on the red carpet for Zendaya, Ariana Grande and Celine Dion. On Tuesday, Roach reshared an Instagram story by Sanchez Bezos, noting that the steel-blue suit she was pictured wearing was a vintage Dior look – a strong suggestion that they’ve paired up . Later that day, she visited the Schiaparelli couture atelier with Roach in tow.
Roach did not respond to a request for comment, but if he is now styling or advising her, that would bring Sanchez Bezos into the dead center of the red carpet styling spotlight – the place where, perhaps more so than runway shows or magazine photoshoots, people become famous for what they wear.
Sanchez Bezos has attended a number of fashion events before, including Balenciaga and Chanel’s ready-to-wear shows last fall. She has also become, throughout her relationship with Bezos, a high-profile client, wearing a couture Schiaparelli dress as a part of her June 2025 wedding festivities in Venice and a custom Dolce & Gabbana gown for the ceremony itself. Vogue celebrated her wedding with a digital cover story; the Instagram post was flooded with negative reactions (“She’s a true example that ‘money can’t buy style and elegance,’” read one typical comment). She attended the Met Gala in 2024, wearing a mirrored strapless gown by Oscar de la Renta. But still she seemed to wobble on fashion’s outer edges, her choice of designer emphasizing that line, often so fine that it is inscrutable to those outside it, between those who wear and admire brands with broad appeal like Oscar de la Renta, and those who follow if-you-know-you-know designers.
Now, the couple appears to have reached a new pinnacle of fashion understanding, or at least access. Their appearances closer and closer to fashion’s power brokers have caught many by surprise, particularly as sentiment towards the world’s rich and powerful is sour at best. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced in November that the couple would sponsor the 2026 Met Gala, social media flooded with outrage. Nevermind that big corporations have sponsored the gala for decades – including Amazon, TikTok, Apple and Yahoo. And that the couple has been criticized for spending money on follies like space travel (for which Sanchez Bezos commissioned custom Monse space suits) and an underground clock that ticks once a year; isn’t sponsoring a museum exhibition a more publicly beneficial use of their money?
But the Met Gala, some seem to believe, is sacred ground – an event that Anna Wintour, as her (unofficial but bestselling) biographer Amy Odell noted, has gone to great pains to restrict to a crowd that fits her exacting taste.
Does this mark the change of fashion’s old rules? The industry went far in the past decade to embrace liberal values: body positivity, inclusivity, diversity. The Met Gala guest list and Vogue covers are shrouded in mythology around who belongs and who doesn’t, even if it is never quite clear why one guest is invited and not another. Asked about the controversy surrounding the couple’s sponsorship of the gala by CNN last year, Wintour described Sanchez Bezos as “a great lover of costume and obviously of fashion” and said that she would be “a wonderful asset to the museum and to the event.”
Sanchez Bezos is not the first to challenge the playbook. Her path, from ambitious TV anchor, to bodacious girlfriend on the arm of a recently-divorced tech tycoon, to wife of one of the world’s richest men, is familiar to anyone who watches “Gilded Age,” has read Edith Wharton or keeps up with the Kardashians. It was a little over a decade ago that Wintour caused a similar kerfuffle when she put Kim Kardashian on the cover of Vogue, in the arms of her then-husband Kanye West, to mark the occasion of their forthcoming wedding. Melania Trump, too, was feted with a Vogue cover when she married Donald Trump in 2005, and she too was ferried around Paris couture week by the late Vogue creative director Andre Leon Talley and Wintour, as she recounts in her 2024 memoir.
Kardashian appears to be something of a template for Sanchez Bezos: she dressed her way into fashion’s inner sanctum, partnering with former French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld to swap her Herve Leger bandage dresses for Phoebe Philo coats. She has since demonstrated a maniacal dedication to fashion akin to body horror, documenting her struggles to squeeze into Balmain latex on TV, shrinking her figure to unwalkable proportions in order to wear Marilyn Monroe’s sparkly dress to the 2022 Met Gala, and whittling her waist into an alarmingly tiny corset by John Galliano for Maison Margiela at the 2024 Met Gala. If she can’t position herself at the vanguard of fashion, (as Sanchez Bezos likely cannot), she could go further than anyone else to embody a designer’s most extreme visions.
Bezos and Bezos Sanchez have demonstrated no such dedication, which is perhaps what makes their presence in Paris so uncomfortable to some. But of course, in fashion, which is an industry that runs on a shoestring even when it’s handing out free champagne, all money is green. Few brands or corporations may have the cash to spend on a Met Gala sponsorship today.
After all, most of the efforts fashion made to democratize itself seem to have faded, suggesting they were trends or fads akin to silhouettes. In the great shakeup of designers that’s taken place over the past two years, the majority of the “new” designers are white men. Models are thinner, with plus size women less visible on runways and red carpets than they were five years ago. In November last year, the daughter of President Trump’s AI and crypto advisor David Sacks appeared at a Paris debutante ball wearing a couture gown by Schiaparelli. Was the brand betraying its fanatics? Or have high-fashion labels always catered to the one percent, who are as unlikely to pass a moral purity test as anyone else? Perhaps the difference with Bezos and Sanchez Bezos is that billionaires aren’t typically so public – they are attempting to rechart the billionaire lifestyle as one predicated on the public performance of glamour, rather than an exegesis of privacy.
The better question is why so many of us expect fashion to make us feel good, when the industry shows us time and time again that in order to survive, it must make us feel anything but.
