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There are so many questions swirling around the forthcoming wedding of Jeff Bezos to Lauren Sánchez this weekend – for instance, who in their right mind books Venice in high summer? Why isn’t Katy Perry going? And how is Eva Longoria still on every guest list, despite not having been famous since 2012? – but the one I keep sticking on in this: as the world’s third richest man, Bezos could, we assume, charm almost any woman on the planet into some sort of marital arrangement with him. In which case, and with all due respect, why Sánchez?
I don’t mean this to be as rude at it sounds. Lauren Sánchez, a 55-year-old former TV presenter and licensed pilot, is, I’m sure, funny and clever and up there with Peter Ustinov as a great dinner party guest. Her betrothed, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to be a man comfortable with making anything but the most obvious choices. Bezos got rich, built a rocket, and turned himself from a weedy tech nerd into a comic-book Mr Universe so that these days he looks like a man wearing an Amazon cardboard box under his polo shirt. That this person would choose not only a woman a mere six years younger than himself but one who, stylistically speaking, edges closer every year to the Jocelyne Wildenstein school of bizarre beautification speaks either to the loveliness of a genuine soul match or something else altogether.
By which I mean: the strange aesthetic that many women inside the Maga world seem enthusiastically to have taken up as the norm. If there is a Maga look for women it is the one exemplified not only by Sánchez but by Kristi Noem, the head of Homeland Security mockingly nicknamed ICE Barbie for her combination of pageant-style looks and heavy-handed immigration policing, and by Melania Trump, whose eyes are creeping slowly but inexorably up the sides of her temples in what is informally known as “Mar-a-Lago” face.
What’s odd about this style isn’t that it’s augmented, but that it’s an aesthetic which seems deliberately to draw attention to its own artificiality in a way that, in other contexts, might be referred to as “bad work”. People with money can make poor choices about cosmetic surgery too, of course, but the uniformity of this particular look – so heavy on the filler, silicone and Botox as to make its wearers seem not younger, but weirder, and in a state of constant discomfort – suggests something closer to design. If you were the type of person to make liberal references to The Handmaid’s Tale, you might even speculate that this aesthetic has been tailored by the world’s richest men to symbolise just how completely – almost derisively – they can control the bodies of the women around them.
But let’s focus on the wedding, which has provided us this week with welcome respite from the news from Iran, with the spectacle of a man worth $223bn being frightened off by the threat of angry locals coming at him with pool floats. The wedding on Saturday was originally planned to take place in the centre of Venice at the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, a 16th-century meeting hall surrounded by canals, raising the spectacle of notable guests including Oprah, the Kardashians and Ivanka Trump arriving on public waterways via open-air taxi.
It is safe to say the Venetians weren’t happy. After a group called No Space for Bezos lightly threatened to disrupt the guests’ arrival with inflatable alligators, Bezos changed venues to a less accessible hall outside the centre. (It should be noted that No Space for Bezos is not the same as Everyone Hates Elon, a different but equally energised group that unfurled a huge banner in the Piazza San Marco bearing the legend, “If you can rent Venice for your wedding then you can pay more tax.” Let’s hope Mark Zuckerberg, who will reportedly be at the wedding, gets his own bespoke group along these lines.)
“We are very proud of this!” said Tommaso Cacciari, No Space for Bezos’s spokesperson, to the BBC on Tuesday. “We are nobodies, we have no money, nothing!” Meanwhile, protest groups including Greenpeace are still planning on demonstrating in the city centre on Saturday to draw attention to the obscenity of a projected 90-odd private jets flying in for the event. As for Bezos and Sánchez, let’s end on a gracious note and wish them all the happiness in the world as they marry in a city that doesn’t want them, in front of 200 people who don’t know them, in a celebration of money over sense. Hurrah!
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Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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