The Marie Antoinette of America: Is it any marvel Jeff Bezos’ spouse is being in comparison with late French Queen after ‘tone deaf’ New York Times interview, asks ALISON BOSHOFF

Lauren Sanchez Bezos, the improbably pneumatic consort of Amazon founder Jeff, has spent the past few days hiking in the Galapagos with her husband, who is one of the world’s wealthiest men.

We know this because there really is no missing the couple’s $500 million, three masted yacht Koru, a 128-metre monster, at harbour off South Seymour island.

Nor indeed its support vessel, the $100 million Abeona, with its 37 staff, anchored next to it.

The Galapagos Islands, fabled for biodiversity and for being one of the last great wildernesses, are probably as good a spot as any to sit out an entertaining outbreak of public furore which this week has led to Sanchez Bezos, 56, being dubbed ‘America’s Marie Antoinette’.

The reason for this less than flattering moniker? There have been angry cries of anti-capitalist dissent coming from New York, where the Met Gala, fashion’s biggest night of the year, takes place next month, and for which the Bezoses are to serve as honorary chairs and lead sponsors.

It has led to posters appearing on lampposts and billboards across Manhattan, calling for a ‘boycott’ of ‘The Bezos Met Gala . . . brought to you by worker exploitation’. 

There’s even talk of a protest on the night – always the first Monday in May – aimed at humiliating and ridiculing the couple.

Yet the activists behind the anti-Bezos movement are not the only ones brandishing their pikes and muskets. From the outset, many in the fashion world have been sniffy about the couple ‘buying’ their way into the gala, which is famously overseen by chilly Vogue boss Anna Wintour.

Nobody lands an invitation to the fundraiser without the say-so of Wintour who, in a statement, said she valued the ‘energy’ which Sanchez Bezos would bring to the role.

Lauren attended the event in 2024, when Wintour was gracious enough to advise her on an outfit. Sanchez Bezos found herself in a dignified Oscar de la Renta dress which seemed a neat compromise between her preferred ‘mob wife’ aesthetic and something more high fashion.

Last year, she landed the cover of Vogue with her wedding, and last autumn and this spring was at Paris fashion weeks with Jeff in tow, dressed in Dior and Schiaparelli.

Now, she is to be ‘recognised’ as a consequential figure in fashion, even though the idea of so elevating Lauren – whose style is bluntly all boobs and bling – is giving fashion snobs a fit of the vapours.

To publicise her fashion coming-of-age, she sat down with the New York Times for a profile. Usually, such interviews are anodyne to the point of boredom. The NYT is a serious publication which almost never trades in the gossipy quarters of journalism. 

However, the Lauren article, headlined: Someone has to be happy. Why not Lauren Sanchez Bezos?, is a most elegant exception to the rule – and making headlines of its own.

In it, writer Amy Chozick skewers Lauren, herself a former journalist, with elegant savagery. Lauren’s many enemies cannot get enough of the details of her life.

Take her daily routine with Jeff, who’s worth around $250 billion. Chozick writes: ‘She and Mr Bezos do everything together. On a typical day, the newlyweds wake around 6am in their new, roughly $230 million compound on Indian Creek, an exclusive private island in Miami often called ‘Billionaire Bunker’. They don’t touch their phones. 

‘Instead, they begin each day by listing ten things they’re grateful for – and they can’t repeat what they named the day before.

‘From there, the couple drink their morning coffee in a sunroom and watch the sun rise: hers from a mug that reads ‘Woke Up Sexy as Hell Again’; his from one she got him that spells HUNK in symbols from the periodic table.

‘They play pickleball. Six days a week they work out with a private trainer. ‘He looks good, doesn’t he?’ Mrs Sanchez Bezos said of her new husband . . . she slow-nodded, repeating, ‘He looks good’.’

The gossip site Jezebel summed up reaction to the above description of their daily routine by writing ‘gross!’ ‘gag!’ and ‘revolting’.

What they, and the many readers who’ve commented on social media and elsewhere, find particularly galling is the apparently worshipful attitude towards someone who is simply obscenely wealthy. 

For what has Lauren, a former presenter on a local TV news station, achieved – aside from piloting a helicopter and writing two children’s books which, were she not married to Bezos, you suspect may not have been published?

Employees at Amazon work long hours in conditions which are famously Spartan for very little in return, and yet here is the wife of its founder and biggest shareholder glorying without conscience in their stupendous good fortune. 

As Chozick says: ‘Mrs Sanchez Bezos seems to have influenced the uber-rich to stop apologising, and start enjoying themselves.’

Lauren’s publicist didn’t respond to requests for comment yesterday, and it has to be said that she seems remarkably unaware of how her ‘positivity’ comes across in the context of the economic hardships which so many are enduring.

Take the now-notorious voyage on Blue Origin, the phallic rocket owned by Bezos, in April last year. It was criticised for being an exercise in meaningless waste of wealth and resources – a joyride for the super-rich. What purpose did it serve, aside from publicity?

Katy Perry’s remark that she, Lauren and the rest of the all-female crew were going to put the ‘ass into astronaut’ caused embarrassment from which Perry’s image has yet to recover. Chozick writes that Sanchez seems oblivious to the push back. 

‘At the elementary school in Connecticut, Mrs Sanchez Bezos told students about going to space on Mr Bezos’s private Blue Origin rocket. ‘I went to space with Katy Perry,’ she said. ‘Yes! How fun is that? It was like a girls’ trip to space.’

‘A little boy raised his hand to ask if she’s ever been to another planet. ‘No,’ Mrs Sanchez Bezos replied. ‘Sometimes it feels like I’m on another planet – but no.”

She has a point there: her life with Jeff Bezos is stratospheric in many ways. They met ten years ago via Sanchez’s then-husband, Hollywood agent Patrick Whitesell. Whitesell represented the actress Michelle Williams and Williams was the star of the 2016 Amazon-distributed film, Manchester By The Sea.

At some point, a plan took shape for Sanchez and Bezos to work together on a documentary about his space project. Tabloids described this as ‘the $50 million alibi’, as during filming the two enjoyed an eight-month affair.

The National Enquirer magazine trailed them across five states and 40,000 miles as they enjoyed private jets, limos, helicopter rides, romantic hikes, five-star hotel hideaways and intimate dinner dates. 

When the news came out in 2019, Bezos announced the end of his marriage to wife MacKenzie Scott, and Sanchez and Whitesell also split, although there were claims that both wronged spouses had been aware of the affair for months and that, by the time it was exposed, all had moved on.

In the divorce, MacKenzie received Amazon stock, making her one of the world’s richest women, and a generous philanthropist.

The spectacle of the Bezos Sanchez wedding – a lavish three-day bacchanal in Venice – last June drew accusations of obscene privilege. 

The weekend included a pre-wedding foam party on Mr Bezos’s superyacht and water taxis to ferry 200 guests, including Sydney Sweeney, Ivanka Trump and five members of the Kardashian-Jenner family – across the Venetian lagoon.

The bride wore a Dolce & Gabbana wedding dress and a diamond ring, worth around $5 million. As Chozick comments: ‘To some it was a tone-deaf display of staggering wealth at a time of historic inequality.’

After Lauren became one half of one of the richest couples in the world, along came an ever-tauter face, an ever-more pneumatic figure, and a busy philanthropic life.

The couple present the Bezos Award for Courage and Civility which comes with a $100 million grant to be given to charities.

Sanchez is also the vice chair of the Bezos Earth Fund, which intends to spend $10 billion to solve the climate crisis. 

So far it has given out at least $2.4 billion in grants, which makes Bezos a big philanthropist, although some say that, relative to his gigantic fortune, it’s not all that much.

Ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, by comparison, has given away roughly $26 billion – and counting.

The optics can also be challenging for Lauren and Jeff in the divisive world of American politics. Lauren declined to utter a word on politics in the NYT profile.

‘When I asked her opinion of Mr Trump, Mrs Sanchez Bezos, who is breezy and agile at pivoting back to the fun topics, waved me off. ‘I’m not talking politics,’ she said. ‘No, no, no, no, no. No way’,’ Chozick writes.

She goes on to write: ‘People close to Mrs Sanchez Bezos often argue that it’s not fair to criticise her for her husband’s political and business decisions. The frequent refrain is, ‘What does that have to do with Lauren?’ But that is the downside to being a conjoined organism to a master of the universe. It all has to do with you.’

Bezos had a combative relationship with President Trump but since buying the Washington Post newspaper in 2013, and since Trump’s re-election, there has been a sea change.

The resolutely Left-wing Post stunned the media world when it did not endorse the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, reportedly because of a direct intervention by Bezos.

More recently, Amazon paid $40 million for the not-at-all-interesting documentary, Melania, about the President’s wife. It has not been a hit on the streamer, and was a limited attraction at the box office, but Amazon’s unaccountable largesse seems to have made Bezos one of Trump’s favoured friends.

Meanwhile, around a third of the Post’s staff have been laid off, along with thousands of Amazon employees, over the past year.

Lauren and Jeff were, of course, in evidence at Trump’s inauguration last year. Lauren infamously wore a white Alexander McQueen suit, slashed to the sternum and with her white lace bra plainly visible. 

Her outfit certainly caught the eye of Mark Zuckerberg who was caught peering down her cleavage. The spectacle led to her being derided by critics as ‘capitalism’s concubine’.

She tells the New York Times that she thought her outfit was conservative. ‘I was super proud of myself,’ she says. The way she explains it, it was only when she removed her coat when indoors that the bra was visible. As luck would have it, her bra featured in almost every photo of the event.

‘I get it,’ she tells the NYT. ‘No lace at the White House. Noted.’

You must be wilfully blind to think that ‘lace’ at the White House – rather than a visible cleavage and underwear – was the issue. Lauren goes on to hint that she thinks some sort of racial stereotyping is to blame for the frequent criticism of her trashy personal aesthetic.

The daughter of Mexican-American parents, she says she’s not to blame for the way she looks. ‘It’s the shape of my body . . . I’m Latin. I’m Latin. I’m Latin,’ she says in the article. The good-natured Ms Chozick says nothing of her rumoured cosmetic enhancements.

Chozick points out that Anna Wintour never has full-busted women in her magazines. Lauren retorts: ‘Maybe she likes them now.’

You feel that the day Wintour thinks Lauren’s two-melons-on-a-plate personal style is high fashion has to be a distant dream, but then she does herself appear on the cover of Vogue this month – an unprecedented move – to plug The Devil Wears Prada, so perhaps end days are now here.

In Lauren’s world, though, all is sunshine and lollipops. She’s nothing if not unfailingly positive, and has got Jeff’s backing all the way. ‘He tells me all the time, ‘You’re one of the smartest women I know’,’ she says. 

Her optimism is such that she urges Chozick to have more children: ‘Do it! I’d have another tomorrow. Tomorrow.’

A spokesman had to clarify that Lauren – who has three children aged 25 to 18 – was not having a baby. 

That’s not stopped everyone, including Vanity Fair, from speculating that an adoption or surrogacy could be the next jaw-dropping step from the couple who have everything – except for taste, and the good opinion of the world.