This Week in Gossip (July 6)

The Bezos wedding sucked, the Academy snubbed Karla, and Doctor Odyssey sank to the bottom of the ocean.

Of Course the Bezos Wedding Was Evil and Tacky

One of the richest men on the planet got married again. Vogue got the scoop. The Kardashians were there, but not all of them. Leo DiCaprio tried to hide from the cameras. The residents of Venice revolted. It’s no surprise that the big day and the weeks of celebrations preceding it garnered endless press coverage. Nor is it the shock of the century that the lion’s share of online reaction has been negative. Much like the new Mrs. Bezos’s grand feminist journey into space, the whole thing was presented to us as a grand moment for humanity but met with a collective eyeroll. Aside from discussing which condiments we’ll all use when it comes time to eat the rich, there was one thing the world seemed to agree upon when it came to the Bezos wedding: it looked tacky as f*ck.

It's an age-old adage that money can't buy you taste. Access to great luxuries and the most elite products doesn't automatically imbue you with distinction or a sense of style. Often, I look at some designer clothes and wonder if they're an extended joke against those with more money than sense. Who buys the Balenciaga Crocs and thinks they make them look cool? Then again, look at Cybertruck owners, poor gullible saps forever screaming “I'm not owned” into the wind as their stainless steel box rusts and Tesla stock tanks.

It's seldom about the quality or style than it is the money. So-called quiet luxury was always far louder about its high-end costs than marketing asserted, but the Bezos-Sanchez wedding was never about humility through image. It was as much an advert as the banners for Amazon Prime that cover every website. The products were a “power couple” eager to be a brand, whether everyone else liked it or not.

Really, the product being marketed was Lauren Sanchez, the former TV presenter and Bezos's mistress turned helicopter pilot and fake astronaut. It hasn't hurt for Jeff to remodel himself as “cool” post-divorce but Lauren is the one who wants to be a star. She was the subject of a hilariously overwrought Vogue profile wherein she posed alongside Bezos's space junk and tried to spin a tale of her fairy-tale girlboss life (I wrote about it for a prior issue of the Gossip Reading Club.)

This was the aesthetic of rich feminine conservatism: faux modest, derivative of classic fashion, the price tag practically hanging off the sleeve. When you're trying to reassert your status as the true Mrs. Bezos after being the side-piece, you pull from history, cladding yourself in white and lace with a designer clutch bearing your new name/brand. It's a far cry from her questionable outfit choice for the Trump inauguration, a bra and blazer combination that would have violated many a dress code in the normal world. But both were very much cut from the cloth of so-called MAGA femininity: sexy, submissive, heavily augmented, the opposite of subtle.

Anna Wintour has been accused of accepting bribes to make the wedding a Vogue cover story, but the magazine has long pandered to the upper echelons of power to create aspirational content. They’d already done that hilariously cringe profile of Sanchez pre-wedding that featured her traipsing around the desert in couture which was accused of not-so-subtly mocking its subject. I don’t think it was a secret hit-piece in disguise, much in the same way that I doubt this wedding spread is a quiet form of protest from Conde Nast because some of the photos are bad. In one, where we see Sanchez trying on her wedding dress, two seamstresses stand in the corner looking miserable. Some said it was Vogue’s way of slamming Sanchez. It’s more likely that this moneyed enterprise didn’t think twice about the faces of labour behind the golden curtain. They’ve protested the formation of too many unions for that to make sense.

I'm not so naive as to pretend that this wedding wasn't fun for its attendees. Venice is gorgeous and the open bar must have been legendary. But looking at those photos of the guests, all staggeringly overdressed for the June heat and with many trying to avoid being photographed, I did wonder how authentic the joy was. Are these people actually close personal friends? How often is Sydney Sweeney hanging out with Lauren Sanchez? What did they talk about with Usher? Did Oprah say hi to the Kushners? When your guest list is mostly people connected to you only through wealth or business deals at your company, how could your own damn wedding not end up feeling like sponcon? Why is Ellie Goulding always at the scene of the crime?

The whole point of being rich is that you don’t have to care what people think of you. So why are the Bezoses so damn eager to be celebrities beloved by the masses? We’re still going to eat you once the orcas knock your yacht to pieces, guys!

Lorde’s Album Art Says “Hold My Beer” to Sabrina Carpenter’s

A lot of people had a lot of opinions over the album art for Sabrina Carpenter’s upcoming album, Man’s Best Friend. I’m reasonably sure that Substack is now 27% Carpenter think-pieces. I wrote a bit about it for Pajiba too so I’m hardly innocent! But the whole kerfuffle felt like a rehash of arguments about femme desire, capitalism, and “being responsible” that we’ve been having for decades. Madonna did it already, guys. Well, with the release of another young pop diva’s new album, the discourse has returned with a vengeance. Lorde’s newest album, Virgin, features an X-ray of her pubic area which reveals her birth control implant and belt buckle. The vinyl release comes with a more revealing shot of that area, albeit clothed in see-through trousers that reveal Lorde’s pubes.