Anna Wintour and Lauren Sánchez Bezos attended the press conference for the 2026 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 4 May 2026 in New York City. The event, traditionally a stately affair, this year evoked comparisons to a feudal lady addressing her serfs or Marie Antoinette in the last days of Versailles. Wintour introduced Sánchez Bezos as a “force for joy,” adding that she and her husband, Jeff, “genuinely, genuinely care about giving back.” Outside, protests against the Bezoses’ involvement had been raging for days, creating a head-spinning discrepancy between public sentiment and the deference inside the glass-ceilinged room.
Fashion’s Faustian Pact
The Met Gala has recently become a magnet for anti-excess protests, but this year’s event was the most controversial yet due to the $10 million patronage of honorary co-chairs Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos. While Bezos previously bankrolled the gala in 2012 as Amazon’s lead sponsor, this year’s event came at a time of soaring inequality, with Bezos’s personal wealth mushrooming and his decisions to appease Donald Trump making him less popular than ever with New York City’s left-leaning fashion and arts crowd.
In protest, the group Everyone Hates Elon projected interviews with disgruntled Amazon workers onto Bezos’s Manhattan penthouse and circulated 300 containers of fake urine within the museum to highlight reports that Amazon drivers must work so relentlessly they pee in bottles. Some pushback came from fashion insiders themselves: former US Vogue editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson co-hosted a rival Ball Without Billionaires, putting Amazon workers on the catwalk, and turned down work with a dream client to boycott the event. “Fashion has always had a talent for laundering. In these moments, it wraps the most sinister individuals in silk, under the warm glow of flashing lights, and manages to convince us it’s culture. This is not new. But I have my limits,” Karefa-Johnson wrote on her Substack.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 and the Zeitgeist
Further criticism came from an unlikely source: The Devil Wears Prada 2, a movie whose iconic editrix, Miranda Priestly, was inspired by Wintour. Released days before the gala, its plot centered on tech baron Benji Barnes’s attempts to buy the depleted Runway magazine for his girlfriend, Emily. While Barnes is fictional, his Bezos-like qualities—including a post-divorce makeover fueled by Sculptra, Ozempic, and testosterone shots—echo unsubstantiated rumors that Bezos wants to buy Vogue for his wife. Barnes delivers a chilling monologue about AI, anticipating a world where the magazine publishes without human involvement. “The future just comes rushing at us like the lava of Pompeii,” he says, while Priestly heroically pushes back, slamming Emily with the burn: “You’re not a visionary, you’re a vendor.”
Screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna says the plot’s similarity to real-world rumors is a coincidence, but casting a rapacious Silicon Valley oligarch as tyrant to the fashion class reflects the zeitgeist. The cultural backlash raises the question of whether fashion’s burgeoning relationship with tech barons will rupture.
The Met Gala’s Role and Rising Tensions
The Met Gala plays a unique role in fashion culture as the only major annual red carpet enabling designers to pursue their wildest, most creative instincts. It also funds the Met’s Costume Institute, one of the world’s largest collections of historical clothing. This year, the gala raised $42 million, with tickets at a chilling $100,000, up from $35,000 in 2022, an inflation coinciding with an increasingly tech-oriented guestlist including Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and staff from OpenAI. The notion that Bezos, Brin, and Zuckerberg—who have buddied up to Trump as his administration defunded the arts—attended because they care about archival garments feels ridiculous.
What the tech barons want from fashion, seemingly, is cultural cachet. For the Bezoses, the event is the latest in an ongoing campaign to win fashion kudos, much of it facilitated by US Vogue. The magazine ran a glowing Sánchez Bezos profile in 2023 and doubled down with a digital wedding cover in 2025. In the past six months, the couple has sat front row at Paris fashion week shows and announced tens of millions in grants and scholarships for sustainable fabrics. Wintour, who stepped down as US Vogue editor in 2025 to take a bigger role at Condé Nast, continues to oversee the Met Gala. She has a history of bringing culturally and commercially potent figures into the fashion fold, like Kim Kardashian, even when critics argue they haven’t earned the prestige. Many top designers have worked with Sánchez Bezos, including “image architect” Law Roach and Schiaparelli, who dressed her in her preferred cleavage-centric, hourglass aesthetic. Tellingly, on Instagram, neither appears to have posted an image of their work.
Industry Discomfort and Silence
As the dust settled, fashion insiders expressed continued discomfort about the Bezos sponsorship, which they felt was disappointingly representative of Condé Nast’s direction, including the recent closure of its most progressive outlet, Teen Vogue. They were also disappointed that so many politically vocal celebrities attended the gala despite the outcry. Those who glided down the red carpet included Anne Hathaway, Bad Bunny, Rihanna, Margot Robbie, Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, and Venus Williams. Taraji P. Henson and Mark Ruffalo were among the few to post anti-Amazon videos; media reports of boycotts from Meryl Streep and Zendaya were unconfirmed.
But the insiders I spoke to did not feel able to speak out. One creative in the fashion world found the event “horrific” and “naff,” saying, “If it was up to me, it would be the end of the Met Gala,” but he did not want to slam friends who worked on red carpet looks. Another emerging designer, whose work appeared in the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, said she was unaware of the Bezoses’ involvement until long after she started working on the show. She felt deeply conflicted, concerned she was being tokenized, “because we know that the Jeff Bezoses of this world don’t care what broke people have to say.” Ultimately, she could not turn down the exposure. “It’s so hard to try to fight it before you have any power to make change.”
The Bleak Landscape and Tech’s Role
The situation in fashion feels bleak, she said. One reason tech billionaires are on trend is that so many luxury brands—customary sponsors of Met exhibitions—are struggling. Last year, Burberry announced plans to cut 1,700 jobs, while Kering, which owns Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Balenciaga, closed 133 stores. “It’s hard to watch: people who have been working for years in the industry that should be protected and have given so much of their creativity, are getting laid off, losing work,” the designer said. “And, at the moment, people like the Bezoses are the only ones funding this stuff.”
Despite the backlash, fashion journalist Amy Odell doesn’t think the tech billionaires are going anywhere. She doesn’t buy the rumors of Bezos acquiring Vogue, but there are many other reasons for him to be part of fashion. Amazon has long sought to get closer to luxury fashion, facing sometimes haughty rebuffs. LVMH’s chief financial officer Jean-Jacques Guiony said in 2016 that “the business of Amazon does not fit with LVMH full stop.”
And there is the glamour. Odell speculated that the Bezoses are wooing fashion because “it’s fun for them. He’s having a midlife crisis, he’s getting some new clothes. His wife wants to be photographed and in the spotlight.” In an oligarch attention economy, “the tech people you can name” are becoming the Kardashians. “They bring publicity. I think fashion is going to continue to embrace them. The question is whether they become normalized the way the Kardashians did.”
There are even more reasons for the top of the fashion industry to welcome this. Sánchez Bezos is what Odell describes as “a VIC,” or very important client, one of the “2% of luxury buyers who account for 40% of sales—that’s the bread and butter for luxury brands, not aspirational customers.” Condé Nast would view Bezos as an ally, whether for Met Gala-style donations or deals like a recent agreement allowing Amazon to pull content from Condé publications for AI-generated podcasts.
The Future of the Met Gala
Whether because the gala has become so complex and incendiary, or because Wintour, 76, will one day retire, the Costume Institute seems to be considering its next move. Lead curator Andrew Bolton told the New York Times that by 2028 or 2030, the institute will have saved enough in a “quasi endowment” to no longer need annual gala support. Bolton said: “The Met Gala is extraordinary, but sometimes it dwarfs everything,” adding that the department’s reliance on it felt precarious. “What if there was another global disaster, and people were like, ‘I can’t come to a party?’” Each year, the gala has become bigger and more high profile, and “there will be a point where that’s not sustainable.”
That said, Odell points to a post-gala podcast interview with Condé Nast’s CEO, Roger Lynch, in which he said this year’s controversy was “good… the intrigue around this event just seems to grow!” Perhaps, Odell said, “they count on the internet’s memory being short. Perhaps they just don’t care, because they don’t talk to normal people.”
If it’s true that those at the top of the industry can’t hear the outcry from the little people at all, it’s easy to imagine the gala—and the luxury industry it represents—spinning ever further into oligarchland, with tech barons playing all the starring roles. At which point, the creatives whose ideas and elan have always driven fashion forward may not want to cheer them on. They may want to eat them.
