Commentary: This year’s Met Gala proved one thing: The real devil who wears Prada is Jeff Bezos

Apparently not content with bankrupting Sears, Toys R Us, Radio Shack and countless other businesses; buying and then maiming the Washington Post; and leading the Tech Bro right turn to MAGA, Jeff Bezos did his level best to ruin this year’s Met Gala.

Simply by being a part of it.

The normally frothy run-up to Monday evening’s annual over-the-top fashion fundraiser for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute was less about which A-listers would attend and who they’d be wearing and more a moratorium on Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who sponsored the event and served as honorary co-chairs.

Not even a tie-in with the much-anticipated and box-office-gratifying debut of “The Devil Wears Prada 2” (which opens with Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly exiting what appears to be the Met Gala) could cut through the news of anti-Bezos protests and calls for boycotts.

Guerrilla activist group Everyone Hates Elon plastered New York with anti-Bezos signage and on Friday, activists placed 300 bottles filled with fake urine inside the museum, drawing attention to complaints by Amazon workers that they are not allowed to take bathroom breaks.

(Though honestly, these could have also served as fashion satire — many of the outfits worn by gala attendees appear to defy the ability to heed nature’s call.)

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani declined his invitation, saying that he wanted to focus his time on “affordability.” Streep got dragged personally into the fray; her absence, as well as that of others including Zendaya, had some wondering if certain members of the glitterati were too incensed by the Bezos-ification of the event to attend. (No one, including Streep and Zendaya, has said they were boycotting; according to her representatives, Streep has never been to the gala because it “has never quite been her scene.”)

As journalist Macaulay Connor says in “The Philadelphia Story,” “The prettiest sight in this fine pretty world is the privileged class enjoying its privileges.” The Met Gala, which began in 1948, was always a fixture of the New York society pages, but in the last 10 years it has become an all-eyes-on cultural fixation.

As that “pretty sight” bumped into an ever-widening socioeconomic gap, that enjoyment has been tinged with controversy. Five years ago Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wore a white gown emblazoned with “Tax the Rich” (having rented the dress at a discount, she was later found to be in violation of congressional gift rules and forced to pay the full value).

In 2024, as the world convulsed around Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip in response to the Jan. 7 attack, many took to social media to compare gala attendees to the finery-bedecked citizens of the Capitol who applauded child murder in “The Hunger Games.”

The good news is that the gala survived its Bezos taint. Loads of the lovely and lauded made their way along the red carpet in a Rose Parade of fashion to mingle among an exhibit celebrating all forms of the human body. Last year, the event raised $31 million for the Costume Institute; this year it will likely raise more.

But there was no avoiding the level of attention, and vitriol, whipped up by Bezos’ participation or the larger issues it reflects.

In the United States, new money has a long tradition of courting respectability (along with tax breaks and naming opportunities) by donating heavily to various cultural institutions. With a few exceptions, however, Silicon Valley’s tech titans have long been criticized for their lack of traditional philanthropy, particularly in the area of the (non-digital) arts. But what might have been seen as Bezos finally getting with the time-honored program is instead viewed by many as his attempt to, as “Sex and the City” star Cynthia Nixon put it, engage in “reputation laundering.”

Bezos has an estimated net worth of around $250 billion, an unfathomable amount of money that makes him one of the richest people in the world. Once considered a canny innovator, and then, with his purchase of the flailing Washington Post, a white knight, he has since become the embodiment of capitalism run amok.

While the rest of the country scrambles to make a living in a world upended by the digital revolution, its creators revel in lifestyles that make the giddy heights of Versailles appear quaint.

In a time when massive layoffs regularly fuel those parts of the news cycle not dedicated to rising prices and global economic insecurity caused by the war in Iran, the Met Gala already seemed tone-deaf to many. Bezos’ participation provided a flashpoint, the rotten cherry on top of the whole stinking “let them eat cake.”

The gala’s appearance in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” already had a slightly bitter aftertaste. Like the Lauren Weisberger novel on which it was based, “The Devil Wears Prada” was a hymn to fashion and fashion journalism. Miranda (based on Anna Wintour) has made Runway (based on Vogue) a dominant force in both fashion and the thriving ecosystem of traditional media. At its end, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) finally rejects her Chanel boots for a daily journalist’s shoe-leather, a career move that, while not glamorous, was still financially viable.

In the second film, not so much. Andy, like so many journalists, is laid off (via text!) even as she is receiving an industry award, while Runway is mired in scandal, as thin as any of its models and clinging onto the last shreds of cultural relevance.

As with so many publications, including this one, its stories and photo spreads have become “content,” its future measured out in clicks.

In such a world, it’s difficult to imagine a young Weisberger getting a job at Vogue or surviving long enough to gather the observations she used to write “The Devil Wears Prada.” Never mind finding a publishing house interested in buying a first-time novel about working at a magazine or a film studio making a movie about it.

The Met Gala may still draw millions of eyeballs, but Vogue, like every other media platform, is struggling. The villain of “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is no longer Streep’s Miranda but Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux), a prospective billionaire buyer of Runway. Who could, if Theroux didn’t have such great hair, be a stand-in for Bezos (who may or may not be considering the purchase of Vogue).

So is it any wonder that, like the multimillon-dollar wedding he threw even as half the Washington Post’s newsroom was being axed in the name of cost-cutting, Bezos’ appearance as a sponsor and honorary chair of the Met Gala cast a pall over the event?

Silicon Valley may still follow Mark Zuckerberg’s edict to “move fast and break things,” but as the rest of us scrabble among the wreckage, it’s a bit much to see someone like Bezos buy his way into a celebration of artistic creation.

And that store where Andy bought her cerulean blue sweater? Amazon put it out of business long ago.