With this year’s Met Gala theme, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” it seems Anna Wintour was hoping to also reawaken Lauren Sánchez’s sense of style (or lack thereof, if you ask a certain New York City restaurateur). The fiancée of former Amazon CEO and current billionaire Jeff Bezos wore Oscar de la Renta as expected, marching up the stairs of the Met solo in a strapless black velvet gown with shattered glass roses. “The shattered glass disappears and reveals the black velvet going up toward her very small waist, which is a gorgeous silhouette,” Oscar de la Renta co-creative director Fernando Garcia told Vogue of the custom design, partly inspired by Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glasswork. As for her favorite accessory for the evening? “It’s going to be Jeff,” Sánchez told Vogue. Bezos joined her at the top of the red-carpet stairs.
In an interview a few days before the annual event, Sánchez told Vogue that the first sketches Garcia and fellow Oscar de la Renta co-creative director Laura Kim sent her were more typical fare for the socialite. “If you saw them, you’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s very Lauren’ — extremely sexy, low cut,” she said. “I go, ‘No, I think I’m going to try something different.’”
We learned late last month that the woman Chrissy Teigen called “incredibly dynamic” would be making her Met Gala debut. “Page Six” reported that Wintour had “wooed” the couple into attending the event widely considered the pinnacle of celebrity, power, and fashion — although regarding the latter, the Condé Nast monarch apparently thinks the soon-to-be Mrs. Bezos required a little help. “Anna Wintour is personally helping Sánchez with selecting her dress,” an insider told fashion journalist and Wintour biographer Amy Odell, adding that she’d been “choosing between custom looks by Oscar de la Renta and two other designers.”
“Anna doesn’t always get personally involved in what guests wear,” the source added (though it’s common lore that Wintour approves nearly every look that appears on the steps of the Met), but reportedly felt that she had no other choice because Sánchez has such “poor taste.”
This year’s Met Gala dress code, the “Garden of Time,” is based upon the J.G. Ballard story of a count and countess living “in their utopia of leisure, art, and beauty,” according to Vogue, which is especially ripe for a man and his wife primed to pick up and move to space at any given moment. And, given the couple were recently invited to the White House for a state dinner with President Joe Biden and the prime minister of Japan, it’s not a total shock the duo piqued the fashion industry’s interest, too. Perhaps $197 billion can’t buy you taste, but in the case of Sánchez, I guess it can buy you a stylist, a meeting with the team at Oscar de la Renta, and the attention of one politically savvy Anna Wintour.
