Discover more from Back Row
Internet Aghast at Vogue's Lauren Sanchez Profile
The response to anything Vogue has published may not have been this blistering since Anna Wintour first put Kim Kardashian on the cover.
This week, Vogue released a contender for the hate read hall of fame: a profile of Lauren Sánchez, news anchor-turned-fiancée to world’s third-richest person Jeff Bezos.
The backlash was swift and severe after the story appeared on Vogue.com and Instagram on Monday. Readers said they were canceling subscriptions. Some said this was par for the course for a magazine that ran a puff piece in 2011 of Syrian First Lady Asma al-Assad. The response to anything Vogue has published may not have been this blistering since Anna Wintour put Kim Kardashian on the April 2014 cover, pegged to her wedding to Kanye West.
Vogue.com editor Chloe Malle wrote the story, which involved Sánchez flying her in a helicopter around Bezos’s 400,000-acre Texas ranch (the size of roughly nine Washington D.C.s). The previous day, Sánchez had flown herself to various sites so Annie Leibovitz could photograph her in the world’s highest-end fashion, including Ferragamo, Dolce & Gabbana, and Valentino. Sánchez wears a Levi’s tank top in the editorial’s most viral photo of her embracing her cowboy hat-wearing fiancé in a truck, though the image seems designed to show off her engagement ring, a giant pink diamond Vogue describes as “possibly viewable from space.” We learn the ranch contains an ostentation called the “10,000 Year Clock,” which will chime at one year, ten years, a hundred years, and ten thousand years. Sànchez says it “represents thinking about the future.” From Vogue:
It took over a year to drill 500 feet into solid limestone and quartz and two years for a diamond-cutting robot to slice stairs into the stone. Inside, enormous titanium and stainless gears looked like giant versions of the inside of my wristwatch and led down to a 10,000 pound bronze-cased concrete pendulum. “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a Halloween party here?” Sánchez said.
Sánchez even posed supine for Leibovitz in a red glittering Dolce & Gabbana gown inside the clock.
We also learn: that Sánchez and her friend Kim Kardashian got into a bidding war at a charity auction that resulted in each paying $200,000 for a single Balenciaga dress; that Sánchez will go to space next year with women who are “paving the way for women”; that the ranch contains a group of Airstream trailers called “Astronaut Village,” and it is here where Bezos, in need of salt to make a proper margarita at 2 p.m., “is magically supplied” just that “by one of the Astronaut Village team members.”
Commenters on Vogue’s Instagram asked why Sánchez was worthy of such a feature, why Vogue was glorifying billionaires, and how much Bezos paid for the story. Many said they’d rather read about Bezos’s ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, who has given away $14 billion of her fortune in three years without seeking out any press. This social media reaction led to a slew of unflattering articles, such as Page Six’s “Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos trolled over ‘uncomfortable’ Vogue shoot: ‘Thought that was Steven Tyler,’” and the Daily Mail’s, “Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos are mercilessly roasted for 'cringe and uncomfortable' Vogue photoshoot - as critics even accuse the magazine of Photoshopping billionaire Amazon founder's 'engorged' BICEPS.”
This is the kind of Vogue-specific story that probably wouldn’t have been given a second thought by many in, say, 2005. Vogue has long peeled the curtain back on how wealthy people live. This was a good business model for most of the magazine’s existence, because advertisers flocked to it knowing these stories were designed to inspire the rest of us to spend money on material goods that we believed would bring us that much closer to the good life.
While publishing a hate piece can be an editorial strategy — this story could be setting a traffic record at Vogue right now — it’s unclear if the magazine knew the reaction would be this negative. Anna has had blind spots in the past, as I report in Anna: The Biography, such as when her staff advised her not to run the cover of LeBron James and Gisele Bündchen that commenters said resembled King Kong and Fay Wray and perpetuated racist stereotypes, and she did it anyway. Her staff also told her not to run the puff piece on Asma al-Assad, but Anna went ahead because she liked the story’s opening photo.
Yet when Anna decided to put Kardashian on the cover in 2014, she knew it would be polarizing. She said in her 2019 Master Class:
…You can’t do an event cover or a controversial cover every month. They have to be chosen, they have to be thought about, they have to have meaning. And when this idea was first suggested to us, I immediately knew that it was right. They were part of the conversation of the day and for Vogue not to recognize that would have been a big misstep. But at same time, I knew that it would be deeply, deeply controversial, and that many of our readers and our audiences would be horrified. I was told that it was trashy, that it was beneath us, what was Vogue coming to? But I believed, and I think all of us on the title believed, it was a significant moment.
You could apply this logic to the Sánchez piece: they are a newsworthy couple, and to ignore the wedding and her existence would be odd for any mass outlet.
This profile is a typical Anna Wintour production in other ways. I reported in my book that former Condé Nast Chairman S.I. Newhouse advised Anna in the nineties to “follow the money.” Since then, she has followed the money to remarkable success.
And while I don’t think commenters are right that Bezos paid for this specific story, their wealth helped make it possible. Over the course of her tenure, Anna has gotten powerful people like Harvey Weinstein to help pay for photo shoots, which he was willing to do when the story promoted one of his movies. Bezos and Sánchez, the Vogue story plainly states, provided helicopter transportation to photo shoot locations — which are nothing short of spectacular — and a place for Annie Leibovitz’s crew to stay.
We get a window into how Anna asks wealthy people for money for other things in Michael Lewis’s book Going Infinite, about the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried. Lewis reports on SBF’s Zoom with Anna where she asked him to pay for the Met Gala, which he was considering in effort to market FTX to a female audience. He didn’t know who she was and played video games throughout the call. Lewis writes, “When you had $22.5 billion, people really, really wanted to be your friend. They’d forgive you anything.”
One can imagine Anna having a similar meeting with Bezos. Amazon sponsored the Met Gala in 2012 and co-hosted it along with his then-wife MacKenzie, the subject of a Vogue profile herself in 2013 pegged to the release of her novel. Bezos attended the Met Gala on his own in 2019, though he was openly with Sánchez by then. Then Anna was seen lunching with Bezos and Sánchez in January 2020. Months later, the New York Times credited him with saving fashion by opening an Amazon storefront for pandemic-battered, Vogue-approved designers like Philip Lim and Batsheva Hay. As for what Bezos got out of all this aside from fun and glamour? Since luxury fashion has ridiculously high margins, being a high-fashion retailer has long been in Amazon’s business interests. (Bezos stepped back from his CEO role in July 2021.)
Bezos is hardly the only billionaire to benefit from associating with Anna and Vogue. Billionaires glamorized by the magazine include the obvious fashion characters, like Aerin Lauder, Ralph Lauren, Michael Kors, and Giorgio Armani. Vogue has also published glamorous stories on tech billionaires including Napster co-founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker and SBF, and tech billionaires’ wives including Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen and Melinda Gates.
These stories tended to focus on the subjects’ philanthropic efforts — something Anna has long viewed as necessary to join the Vogue fold — and to avoid probing and uncomfortable questions. The 2017 Parker profile was titled, “Sean and Alexandra Parker Save The World,” and opens with the couple bantering about their $4.5 million wedding, where each guest got a custom look designed by Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings costume designer Ngila Dickson; the story then went into the Parkers’ efforts to cure cancer. A 2022 story that has aged particularly poorly featured SBF and supermodel Gisele Bündchen’s campaign for FTX, which promoted her appointment as the “Head of Environmental and Social Initiatives.” This apparently meant that she was going to help connect the company to charities. (Lewis reports she was to be paid $19.8 million for twenty hours of her time spread over three years.) The piece described SBF as “shar[ing] the supermodel’s passion for philanthropy, and organizations focused on combating poverty, protecting wildlife, and safeguarding the environment for future generations,” and included this:
A quick study, Bündchen found herself fascinated by the possibility that new mediums of exchange can challenge inequality. “There is a real potential for good [with crypto], a chance to foster positive change and create a level playing field,” she says. “Our current system hasn’t worked out great for everyone.”
SBF was recently found guilty on seven counts of criminal fraud and now faces a 100-year prison sentence.
A few things make the Sánchez profile stand apart from these stories. One, Bezos is a face of both union busting and material excess so extreme that he can afford to spend three years carving up a solid limestone and quartz rock face for a big clock. Two, disillusion with the American Dream and the general public’s negative view of extreme wealth may never have been this acute in my millennial lifetime.
Three, the cognitive dissonance of Sánchez being “particularly focused on the environmental work of the Bezos Earth Fund” — the $10 billion Bezos has pledged so far to combatting climate change — while a hobby helicopter pilot, frequent private plane flier, and passenger aboard the world’s largest sailing yacht is hard to gloss over, to say nothing of the impact Amazon has had on the planet. This is all Vogue gives us on that:
Sánchez is undaunted by the question of how she reconciles her own carbon footprint with her environmental work. “I think Jeff and I really are focusing on the long-term commitment to climate, and we’re extremely optimistic about it. Ten billion is just the beginning.” She says they also use green aviation fuel when possible and that Koru can sail using only wind power. “We’ve done it and it is magical.”
Yet if Bezos was around long enough to make margaritas from scratch, why wasn’t he asked about this?
As a longtime supporter of Anna’s initiatives, there’s no way he would be. A profile of Sánchez didn’t have to be a hate read, but under its editorial templates, Vogue might not have been able to produce anything else.
Vogue has long been seen as a safe place for celebrities to appear. Backlash this bad suggests that’s no longer always the case.
Related in the Substack Network:
The clock alone is disgusting.. Who even thinks up crap like that and how many people could have been helped with what that cost??
In today’s world these two look tacky and tone deaf and Anna is clueless because I don’t think anyone is aspiring to be them….Yet we all keep buying everything from him and funding him flying his toys to space.
AW is completely without soul.