Okay, I admit it. A boob tube is most definitely a crime against fashion. But is the fact a woman in her fifties is spied, on the cusp of New Year’s Eve, dancing on a sofa in a bar, really deserving of a tsunami of online hate? Are people concerned she should dismount before she breaks a hip? Shouldn’t Lauren Sanchez Bezos be having a post-menopausal lie down due to the hate, sorry, heat?
Printable comments below the footage include: ‘Unpopular opinion but there does come a point when you’re too old for this.’ ‘Exhausting and cringe.’ ‘This is what hell looks like.’ And, ‘Doing normie s**t with my botched wife.’ I won’t add oxygen to the more unpleasant remarks.
The video of the gyrating, taken by a fellow guest at a friend’s birthday party on St Barts’ Nikki Beach, was first shown on the Page Six website and has since gained traction due to the brevity of Sanchez’s denim skirt.
Her hair is over-dyed and nails are too long apparently (can’t seem to get this length thing right, can she?). Meanwhile her wide-brimmed hat failed dismally to put her extended lips and breasts safely in the shade.
But her greatest crime of all, according to the online trolls, is that she seemed to be openly enjoying herself. Shouldn’t she be worrying about turning 60? Not living it large with all the possibility of bingo wings flapping, but sat, clinging to her husband – 61-year-old Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men – as though he were a helium balloon making a bid for freedom.
All around her were ‘bottle girls’ (I’d never heard the term before) and twenty-something girlfriends (Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest squeeze, Vittoria Ceretti, was a guest on the Bezos yacht for New Year: She’s a 27-year-old Italian supermodel. The type Carrie Fisher refers to in When Harry Met Sally as ‘Thin, pretty, big t**s. Your basic nightmare.’)
Shouldn’t Sanchez be in a kaftan or pareo or even better a burqa? Before wriggling to get into her bikini behind a bath sheet – which is what women past 35 are told to do. A pathetic solo tango in case any man nearby catches sight of cellulite or a superfluous hair (anything below our eyebrows) that glints in the sun. The sun is the enemy, too. We should never bask in it, revel in it, worship it.
But Lauren Sanchez is clearly enjoying her breasts when women have had it drummed into our heads for decades to fear them. (A plus point: I doubt she could drown, a possibility if you choose to get married in Venice.)
Alcohol, too, we’re told will kill us faster than it does men, so she should give the $10,000 bubbly a miss. Shouldn’t she be off being a slave to her (now adult) three children? Or worrying about impending incontinence?
Older woman should be a hot mess of embarrassing afflictions, not carefree in the Caribbean, dancing to banging tunes, so the barrage of criticism would have it.
Someone on X even pointed out: ‘Imagine [being] married to the richest man in the world and you are taking your phone out to record when you are getting a bottle service lol. You can tell someone who grows up from poverty.’
Sanchez did indeed sleep in her grandmother’s car and benefited from family support and social services. So, she’s nouveau not nepo: the rich and privileged can never win.
Sanchez – okay, I will type that she is 56 but I really don’t want to reduce her to a number – is growing older disgracefully.
She doesn’t, thank the Lord, take herself too seriously: she started her wedding week with a foam party on a yacht and went into space wearing a comic-book catsuit.
Yes, of course, her refurbishment has erased most of her original features (in her case not mantelpieces and panelling but her lips, nose, facial structure. She told Vogue, ‘I’m a different person than I was five years ago.’) But let’s face it, with time and money no object, and a rich husband to hang onto, I’d indulge in every high-tech cosmetic procedure going.
Catching a glimpse of the inside of my elbows, my melting-Viennetta buttocks and scars from my breast reduction, the hammocks each side of my mouth in an unfriendly hotel mirror is dispiriting enough. Imagine having every person you encounter, even at a private party or in the middle of the ocean, posting a photo of your wobbly bits online!
And remember: Sanchez is damaging no one but herself. I can’t see young women aspiring to look like her, any more than they look up to Joan Collins.
Of course, it’s an uneven playing field: Jeff Bezos hasn’t high tailed it to Turkey for a hair transplant, doubtless knowing his money, power and intelligence trump hirsute. And the only size he ever has to worry about is the length of his yacht.
Sanchez is undoubtedly not stupid: she worked as an Emmy award-winning journalist. To my mind, she is championing older women, not moaning about hot flushes and brittle bones, meaning she does more for our morale than the likes of Naomi Watts with her books and ‘wellness’ brand will ever do. Not everything about being female is a problem.
Sometimes, and too rarely, being a woman is absolutely fabulous. Lauren Sanchez is proof.
Her wedding gown, designed by Dolce & Gabbana, took 1,900 hours to make and cost an estimated $300,000. Her decision to wear a corset did not make her oppressed, rather a doppelganger of her idol, Sophia Loren. And don’t say, ‘Well if she spent less on clothes the poor would no longer go hungry.’ I think the only people to blame for war and famine are men, not shopaholics. To quote Carrie Bradshaw, she’s simply exercising a woman’s right to shoes.
Lauren Sanchez is like Marmite – you admire her joie de vivre or, rather chippily in my book, you hate her. But either way, clearly the only person whose opinion she cares about is her husband’s, such an old-fashioned and underrated conceit. And there he is, partying and clapping right alongside her.
