Issue 23: Vogue Tries to Sell Lauren Sánchez as an Icon

The future Mrs. Jeff Bezos really really wants you to like her.

The Blue Origin all-female flight to space was perhaps the funniest and most painfully on-the-nose representation of corporate girlboss feminism I’ve ever seen. It was a Reductress article brought to life with flared jumpsuits and mascara. Jeff Bezos’s space tourism vanity project tried to reinvent itself as punching through the glass ceiling (with its phallic craft) with a “crew” that included Katy Perry, Gayle King, and his own fiancée, Lauren Sánchez. Never mind that the flight only lasted 11 minutes and did nothing for humanity but act as a glorified ad for billionaire jaunts who are now too afraid to visit the Titanic in a sub. While the women involved continue to assert that they did something Important, the world reacted with a grand shrug. The memes were great, at least.

The glut of glowing and slobbering coverage the flight got handily gave the game away. It’s par for the course for Sánchez, a former TV host and Bezos’s mistress turned future wife. As the pair tries to sell themselves as a glamorous power couple, one of the richest men on the planet has been eager to elevate his fiancée’s social status. They’re going to be the new pre-divorce Bill and Melinda Gates, but with less pretence about caring for charitable causes. Helpfully for them, Vogue was on hand to aid the cause.

Vogue. "Lauren Sánchez Is Looking to the Future." November 13, 2023. Chloe Malle.

(lol. Image via Vogue.)

In January 2019, Jeff Bezos and his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie, released a joint statement announcing that they planned to divorce. The following month, Bezos published allegations that the National Enquirer publisher American Media, Inc. had attempted to blackmail him over his affair with Lauren Sánchez, who at the time was married to Hollywood agent Patrick Whitesell (he represents Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Amy Adams, Joaquin Phoenix, Hugh Jackman, and Christian Bale, among many many others.) As MacKenzie dedicated her future to donating the many billions she received in the divorce settlement, Bezos and Sánchez went to work reinventing themselves as the new, well, Jeff and MacKenzie, albeit more public, more celebrity-adjacent, and more glamorous. Well, “glamour” is a term thrown around a lot these days…

Sánchez is a former TV host who you may have seen in shows like So You Think You Can Dance and Extra. She was the runner-up in the nationwide hosting competition during season 2 of The View, but lost to Lisa Ling. In 2016, she pivoted to helicopter work, founding Black Ops Aviation, the first female-owned aerial film and production company in America. She wasn't a nobody pre-Bezos, but she also wasn’t a household name. Besides, TV host fame is a very different kind of fame to that of a billionaire or his spouse. That requires a bit of PR polish, particularly when you’re the mistress turned future second wife.

The piece opens with Bezos making margaritas for Sánchez and journalist Chloe Malle (longtime Vogue writer and daughter of Candice Bergen!) One imagines it'd be a cute gesture if it were anyone else, and it wasn't in the same paragraph as a detail about Bezos building "the so-called 10,000 Year Clock, a subterranean engineering feat envisioned by Bezos with next generations in mind." We then hear about his ever-so-romantic proposal, involving "a pink diamond, possibly viewable from space and definitely viewable through a paparazzo’s long lens aimed at the prow of Koru, Bezos’s three-masted sailing yacht, the largest in the world." This moment feels like it could be an opportunity for the reader to indulge in some wealth porn, which is very Vogue, but it could also be an open door to roll your eyes at the obscenity of it all. I know which side I fall on. I’m curious about how equal that divide was among the general readership.

This piece is all about positioning this pair as celebrities but also something beyond that. Yes, they’re pals with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates, and Queen Rania of Jordan, all of whom attended their at-sea engagement party. Yes, they're eager to put on a show for Vogue. But they're entrepeneurs, dammit. Especially Sánchez, who wants to be known as more than a former TV star and mistress (that word never appears in the piece, unsurprisingly, but it's hard to ignore that phallic rocket in the desert when reading it.) She’s the one whose image needs to be elevated the most, although I’m sure it didn’t hurt for Bezos to try and model himself as a wife guy with tight white t-shirts.

(loooool. Image via Vogue.)

As Malle notes, Bezos was once far more press-shy, avoiding most of the media attention when married to MacKenzie and raising their four kids in Seattle. With Sánchez, Malle says, "it’s as if he’s emerged from his chrysalis, a swole monarch" (ew) alongside "the perfect partner for all of it." Their respective friends talk about how they're so in love and make one another better (pay no attention to their exes.) Bezos brags that his new love "has really helped me put more energy into my relationships [...] She’s always encouraging me: ‘Call your kids. Call your dad. Call your mom.’" How nice that she reminds him to... pay occasional attention to his family? Rich people live differently, I suppose.

I was honestly kind of surprised that the piece even mentioned the National Enquirer story and the fact that this was an affair, although they use the more neutral term of “love affair,” and it gets only a couple of sentences before the topic is shifted. Granted, I suppose they had to acknowledge the obvious, and it’s not like the lovebirds are asked any probing questions about it.

I can’t claim I went into this piece with an open mind since I refuse to give billionaires such a luxury, but I also don’t think that Sánchez comes across very well here. It’s the expected rich person blindness, really, like bragging about all the designers eager to make her wedding dress or discussing her plans to go into space (which she insists is part of a wider feminist endeavour, and we know how that ended.) She doesn’t seem especially charismatic or earnest on matters beyond herself and helicopters. If this piece was just about Sánchez , maybe it’d be different. But she’s marrying Jeff Bezos. And this piece is all about how she, if her own words, cannot wait to be Mrs. Bezos. She is part of a package deal, and that means we have to put up with this crooked union-busting loser and future Trump goon doing his best “my wife” act.

Bezos certainly tries to come off as charming, but I don't think Malle buys it. She calls him "slow" at cocktail mixing, and when he mentions a "couple more meetings" he has to attend, Malle notes that "the day before, the FTC sued Amazon for allegedly violating antitrust laws." Every moment he or Sánchez try to sell themselves as a normal family is contrasted with a detail of their exorbitant wealth. Their charitable efforts, including "a $10 billion commitment to climate solutions", cannot help but fall flat in between talk of 11-minute jaunts to space. I keep returning to this 10,000 Year Clock, which Bezos thinks "will take on a certain kind of respect" after "a few hundred years." Dude, we won't be here in a century if your sh*tty company keeps churning out cheap plastic and eroding labour rights for millions.

All of the photos are, of course, ridiculous. Annie Liebowitz’s trademark and oft-derided style elevates scenes of Sánchez in couture on Bezos’s ranch and at Blue Origin HQ to the sort of parodic glamour that one expects from images of dictators’ wives. You could imagine a Succession episode where Shiv does a shoot like this and her brothers call her d*ckbag Eva Braun or something. It also just emphasizes how much this entire thing is an ad: for Bezos, for Blue Origin, for Sánchez, and for the Bezos Power Couple brand. You’re supposed to walk away from this profile in awe, heartened that these crazy kids found one another and are working towards The Better Good. Nobody believed it.

(loooooooooooooool. Image via Vogue.)

That’s in part because we have increasingly little tolerance for billionaires and their bullsh*t. You already have all the money. Why do we have to like you as well? Elon Musk is like this too: so pathetically desperate to be seen as cooler than everyone else and willing to throw obscene amounts of money at the problem to fix it. What reasons does this Vogue piece give us to like Bezos? He makes margaritas for his girlfriend? He invented a big clock that will only ring four or five times over the next 10,000 years? He’s in the middle of a particular kind of “rugged pseudo cowboy masculinity” image change that tech bros are obsessed with?

One cannot help but wonder if this was almost intended as a hate read. It certainly garnered a lot of attention and in the click-driven economy, that is what matters. Malle does a good job here contextualizing the astonishing wealth of these two people who are trying to play at being super real, even if the profile was clearly intended to be a puff piece. I would LOVE to know what Malle was forced to cut.

But I can’t fully commit to this narrative because I think it gives Anna Wintour too much credit, and it was her call to dedicate this much space and resources to a Bezos cheerleading session (even if Malle is reluctant at best.) She isn’t sticking it to The Man. She wants Bezos to give her money and access.

I don’t think Bezos paid for this piece, as many people suggested, although I don’t think his money was not a deciding factor in commissioning it. The piece notes that Bezos and Sánchez provided helicopter transportation and a place for Liebowitz and her crew to stay during location shoots, which certainly helped keep costs down for Conde Nast. This is not the ‘90s, where you could get paid $5 a word and only had to submit two or three pieces a year (I was born in the wrong era.) Even Conde Nast has had to stridently tighten its belts. That means smaller-scale projects and a less scathing approach towards subjects who could influence advertising dollars.

And the flipside is that a lot of people with suspect agendas can get easier access to good publicity and the kudos of the elite mainstream press. A magazine like Vogue is still built upon the maintenance of glamour, and in 2025, that has come to mean influencers, tech bros, and Republicans. You have people like Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry lending former social pariahs like Bezos, Ivanka Trump, and Sam Altman a kind of celebrity kudos through their associations, and by extension an in to the glamorous worlds of traditional fame.

Why would you want to be beloved when you’re so rich that likeability shouldn’t even matter anymore? Isn’t the whole point of being wealthy that you can just be evil and get away with it? Jeff Bezos could just be another rich dude who donates money to his favourite causes and parties with actors on yachts without all this PR spin. Lauren Sánchez could have been a quiet partner and collaborator, working behind the scenes much like MacKenzie did. Truly, I do wonder if these losers are just mad that they can’t make people love them. Look at Elon Musk, a socially stunted charisma vacuum with a breeding fetish who is so pathetically desperate to have fans that he pays people to be good at video games on his behalf.

I’ve considered several reasons for this mindset, but I’m not sure I have the right one. Money comes with its own access, so it’s not like they need to style themselves as cool and marketable to get invited to stuff like the Oscars or Met Gala. Bezos doesn’t get much benefits from a Vogue makeover when it comes to fighting court cases or sucking up to the Trump administration. Is this a pure ego thing, a sign of boredom from a man who has it all but doesn’t want to actively improve the world with his ill-gotten wealth? Why help the needy when you can just get a magazine to make it seem like you’re doing it?

While I was writing this piece, Sánchez and Bezos were in Paris as part of their extended pre-wedding celebrations. They were at the Cannes Film Festival, schmoozing with the stars on many a yacht. Kim Kardashian was with them, of course, as was Katy Perry. Headlines say that the ceremony itself, reportedly set to take place in Venice, may “only” cost around $10 million. According to Page Six, Venetian activists plan to protest their city’s takeover by rich a-holes. While this is happening, the Washington Post, owned by Bezos, was reported to be offering buyouts to any employee who has been there for over ten years. This comes after the paper faced immense pushback for its increasingly pro-Trump slant and decimation of its reporting desks in favour of right-wing opinion.

(Image via Flickr - Creative Commons Licence.)

“Lauren wakes up thinking about how to help people,” the Vogue piece tells us. That quality is utterly incompatible with being a billionaire (and with being married to one.) You cannot claim to be generous or considerate when you’re working overtime, with a major publication in your corner, to sell yourself as a power couple with spaceships and couture gowns in the desert. Not even mass philanthropy (which the Bezos duo aren’t as committed to as they claim) can spin away the heart of the matter: Amazon is a destructive corporate entity, billionaires shouldn’t exist, and it’s insulting to demand that we like these chumps because they like one another. That’s what the money’s for.

(Wikimedia Commons - Creative Commons Licence. Image via Alec Perkins.)

Thanks for reading. You can find my other work scattered across the internet.

Over on Pajiba, I wrote about Katy Perry’s Vegas residency and the weird flop allegations surrounding it. I also offered a fun Summer reading list not written by AI or featuring made-up titles. I talked about Tom Cruise’s ascent from couch-jumping oddball to untouchable and invincible mega-star stuntman. For Inverse, I “celebrated” the 25th anniversary of one of the worst films ever, Battlefield Earth. I reviewed the second season of Nine Perfect Strangers for TheWrap. I was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Screenshot, talking about the history of blockbusters and what they look like in 2025.

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