The flash wives club
let them get wed
The only time I’ve ever really felt the wrath of the internet was when I wrote about my wedding. I didn’t “do” the usual bride-y things. I mean I did. I married a man, I wore a dress and I scored some pretty good jewellery out of it. But I didn’t wear a “wedding” dress. I didn’t stand on a podium in Jenny Packham and sob over a veil (but I did borrow a friend’s to wear for absolute aesthetic reasons).
At the time I wrote a piece about how you didn’t have to fall for the vice grip of the wedding industry. You could just wear something nice and not have those awful chairs dressed up with a shiny back-bow. I wrote about how a wedding is your basic taste crisis. I stand by that. That doesn't make weddings bad, but they’re too generic to be anything other than naff. You can try all you want to “do something different” but there will be vows and guests in questionable ensembles and real flowers and speeches and dancing and fin.
Weddings are, in all their cliché glory, common as muck. Anyone can do it! I mean it’s fine. But you’re not special because you got married, arguably getting married is the most generic, unoriginal thing you can do. Again, that doesn’t mean it’s bad. I love a wedding! But I don’t want my house to look like one. ANYWAY that was a long way of saying that after I wrote the below -
When I became engaged last year, I knew what wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t want a ‘venue’ with those awful conference centre chairs covered in some white muslin and a lilac organza bow; I had no interest in creating a Pinterest mood board; there would be no baskets of flip-flops, nor overgrown bridesmaids in creepy matching dresses. And, crucially, I wasn’t going near a bridal shop.
My view of weddings has always been that they’re inescapably naff, and not something I particularly aspired to. I’ve watched friends marry, with varying degrees of bridezilla rearing through. But I’d also seen them let down by the supposed ‘magical’ process they’d been willing to sign up to: if you’re over a size 12, trying on dress samples – while the sales assistant wrenches the two sides of the dress together behind you so you can try and imagine what it would look like if your hips weren’t getting in the way – is depressing.
Being directed by a bored jeweller to the small corner of their ring tray featuring the meek-looking diamonds in your budget is unnecessarily patronising. Being quoted over £1,000 for a regional hairdresser to come and blow-dry your hair? That’s just offensive.
I was bombarded on Twitter with all these nutty women telling me how horrible I was and that I was kicking a bomb into the £15 billion bridal industry. By little old me, not buying a “wedding” dress! I wore a Giles Deacon gown which was covered in a mushroom print - that was 10 years ago and it is still my absolute favourite thing I’ve worn. They were very, very cross about the whole thing, and threw accusations that my piece was unfair and unbalanced - it was a first person piece about my own wedding but lol.
I had other personal reasons for finding umbrage at the state of the patriarchal hangover that a wedding still is. The only person who I would have sucked all that up for was long dead, and so apart from anything the whole experience also made me feel a bit shit. I couldn’t have my Dad walk me down the aisle or give a speech of any of that hoopla, so the fallacy that you “had” to have a wedding in a certain way was quite clearly old fashioned bullshit to me, anyway.
What I learned from the exposure of writing about it in a national newspaper is that people (women) really, really care about weddings.
I thought a lot about this over the last week or so when the Bechez ballyhoo rolled into Venice. Of course they got a Vogue cover! The whole thing is a viral thirst trap! Of course they all looked flashy and brash and naff and money can’t buy taste blah blah blah. They were at a wedding! That is the modus operandi of a wedding. It is a naff-topia.
Jeff and Lauren are clearly styling themselves as quasi-royal society types (what is a royal wedding but the absolute pinnacle of naffdom?). He’s hard-peck-leaning into his faux-philanthropic charity-washing era. She’s got her space huns and bomb-tits and Dolce & Gabbana on speed dial.
Is it all in bad taste given the rest of the world’s dramas, wars and financial shit show? Of course. But so is every day they exist at the pinnacle of the global money tree, prancing around on their yacht, and turning up to made up award ceremonies to snap up prizes for playing the benevolent-billionaires and swanning off to space for 11 minutes.
More riveting than the tit-baring looks from the world’s worst guest list (imagine having to be in a room with all those awful people) I thought was how keenly Lauren’s leaning into the new bride, new life.
As the curtain dropped on her “digital” Vogue cover (also a digital cover is totally meaningless! It’s just a way to make celebrities think they’re special, the magazine isn’t taking a sales-figure punt on them) she rebranded her Instagram page under her new moniker of Lauren Sánchez Bezos and scrubbed clean the entire thing.
Her digital life did not exist before becoming Mrs B. She’s starting again from matrimony. I wrote about the pair for the current issue of Grazia, and consequently spent some time rolling through her feed. Mostly it was populated with promotion for her children’s book about a fly going to space and the very House of Windsor-coded drop ins at children’s centres and the like flashing her role as a Vice President of the Bezos Earth fund. It already felt pretty on-brand for Mrs B.
I wondered while writing why on earth they are courting this level of public scrutiny, with their level of wealth they could more than easily slink off into stealth-y oblivion. I asked PR supremo Molly Macpherson for her thoughts, which I think are riveting. You can’t buy respect, you can’t throw money at yourselves to make people like you.
“Relevance is the new wealth and headlines are its currency. If Jeff Bezos can't be the world's richest man, he can try to be the most photographed one. The relationship with Lauren Sanchez is being sold to the public as romantic, but they're really selling a spectacle. Together, they are trying to co-brand as an A-list power couple. Bezos has money to buy almost anything, but not respect. That has to be earned. What the public sees is a couple hustling for relevance capital.” Molly Macpherson
The eradication and revamp of her Instagram is odd, it’s like when a new designer comes into a fashion house and wipes clean the feed. For a 55 year old woman, who very much has her own complete agency, it feels like a weirdly reductive move.
Yet, happily in sync with the rising relevance and status being a Wife has in current culture, and the associated drilling down of traditional binary roles. Trad wives and pronatalists have propelled the label of wife into something extra, something critical. At the other end of the demographic spectrum are the women of the All Fours book club, reconsidering all options. One gets the impression that Sánchez isn’t a big Miranda July-stan.
There are those taking umbrage at the attention fawned onto a couple who sat front and centre-tits at Trump’s inauguration. Spitting mock-horror across a social media platform owned by another attendee, while simultaneously lusting after Jonathan Anderson’s new Dior collection trophies, a brand owned by Bernard Arnault’s LVMH, also present at Trump’s second coming.
Perhaps we should worry less about what the little women are wearing, and more about how happily we enable the men to retain their seats at a rather dubious table.
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