We live in an age when the most successful revolutionaries are not the peasants but the Silicon Valley billionaires. They are the true disrupters, the victorious radicals and the people who have successfully ripped up legacy systems and replaced them with themselves. Revolutionaries used to rebel against governments, but the techlords are now so powerful that meaningful revolt against them could really only come from governments. Governments are the new peasants. The erstwhile peasants, meanwhile, are in endless thrall to the technologies of their overlords, each one carrying in their hands a device pretty much guaranteed to distract them from doing anything other than clicking impotently – and only when they remember – on “change”. Never mind televised; their revolution will be narcotised.
Anyhow: I can’t believe Lauren Sánchez hasn’t gone with the above paragraph as the theme for the Met Ball that her husband, Jeff, bought her. Maybe it was too long for the invitations. Either way, we are just over a week away from the biggest event in the fashion calendar, which, like his own fairy godfather, the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, has purchased the honorary chairmanship of for himself and his wife. Cinderella and her Cinderfella shall go to the ball. You cannot imagine how much Silicon there’s going to be at the event.
Seriously, I’m not kidding. Tables – which cost $350,000 for the night – have been bought with spare change by Meta/Instagram, Open AI, Amazon, Snapchat, ShopMy … the list goes on. If you are a Valley tech company that destroyed magazines, department stores or any other yesteryear curators of style, chances are you’ll have spaffed half the cost of an MRI machine to show that if you can’t buy taste, you can certainly buy tastemakers. Anna Wintour, the longtime high priestess of this annual party held at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in aid of its Costume Institute, can see by Vogue’s diminished cultural power that you can’t beat these people. Presumably this is why she’s felt forced to let them join her.
But enough of yesterday’s queen. Today’s world surely belongs to Lauren. Ever since she burst into our consciousness as Bezos’s girlfriend, it has seemed as though there were no worlds madam could not conquer. Described by so many as “a force” – my favourite euphemism – Lauren spent part of her engagement preparing for a hugely excitable all-female mission to the edge of space. (Although in fairness, I never again want to hear the lie “in space, no one can hear you scream”. Those of us watching on Earth heard nothing else for the entire duration of the ladies’ trip.)
For Lauren’s French hen weekend (bachelorette party, in the American language), Paris offered about as much resistance as it had at certain key moments in the 20th century, while the Bezos-Sánchez wedding in Venice represented the most comprehensive conquest of that city since Napoleon. If you can imagine Napoleon flanked by assorted Kardashians and Scooter Braun (and I think we all can). Protests? There were a few, but those are just the cost of doing business.
Inevitably, protests are already under way in New York ahead of the event, with poster campaigns advising beholders to “Boycott The Bezos Met Gala”. And yet, at whom is this exhortation aimed? You can’t help feeling that anyone who has spent $75,000 on a ticket is unlikely to be given pause, while the general public might struggle to convincingly boycott an event to which they were pointedly never invited in the first place.
I’m not sure if you saw the recent New York Times interview with Lauren, but there was so much to enjoy. Every morning she and Jeff wake up in their $230m Miami compound, ignore their phones and start their day by drinking coffee from the mugs they bought each other. His: HUNK spelled out in symbols from the periodic table. Hers: adorned with the slogan “Woke Up Sexy as Hell Again”, purchased from Amazon. (Sorry Anna, but the basics have inherited the Earth.) While they’re drinking from these vessels, Lauren and Jeff each list 10 things they’re grateful for, with the stipulation that line items can’t be repeated. It’s nice how Lauren makes this sound like a proper challenge. Then again, simply listing the places Amazon doesn’t pay fair tax would surely buy them a few weeks’ worth of lists.
Ultimately, perhaps the couple’s storming of the fashion castle is to be expected. Museums have always had to fawn over rich but obviously awful patrons. In any case, it feels as if Lauren and Jeff derive a specific energy from the attentions of their detractors. Consider their entire public demeanour. They behave in precisely the opposite ways to those their haters keep telling them to behave. It’s almost as if doing the opposite is what gives them the roadmap – the couple might not know quite what to do with themselves if there weren’t millions of people screaming at them what not to do with themselves.
Looked at this way, it makes perfect sense that the layoff of 16,000 Amazon workers in January should have served as a curtain-raiser to Lauren doing the couture shows in Paris draped in diamonds and high-end pelts. It completely follows that laid-off Washington Post staffers would days later be crowdfunding to get out of the war zones they were in the middle of covering, while Lauren and Jeff were promptly announced as turbo-donors and honorary chairs of the Met Gala. Just be sure that whatever Merry Antoinette is literally wearing in a week or so on the big night, she will figuratively be wearing floor-length rhinoceros hide. Always is.
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Marina Hyde’s new book, What a Time to be Alive!, is out in September (Guardian Faber Publishing, £20). To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
