How did Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos end up in Vogue? Everyone is still talking about the recent magazine feature on America’s horniest-for-each-other couple with equal parts glee and disgust. As someone smarter than me posited (sorry, I can’t remember who, DM me), this is the purest form of camp: a caricature of an Annie Leibovitz shoot, actually shot by Annie Leibovitz; a man dressed up like a cowboy, wearing bro bracelets; an augmented, otherworldly woman in Skims, Staud, and glimmering jewel-toned gala dresses. It’s the American dream, right? And yet, many of the conversations I’ve had this past week have been about Anna Wintour’s decision to greenlight the piece in the first place. Why and how, they asked.
It’s true that, a year ago, it probably wouldn’t have happened. But Sánchez, who by all accounts (including one from my mom friend who used to be her assistant) is a Really Nice Person, has been smart about the press. Her first big feature was written by another Really Nice Person, Derek Blasberg, for WSJ., then edited by his friend, yet another Really Nice Person, Kristina O’Neill. Wintour rarely goes first, she goes the biggest, and by the time Chloe Malle was shipped off to West Texas to profile Sánchez, she was already engaged to Bezos, about to become one of the richest women in the world.
It also helps that through Amazon, Bezos has given Vogue and Condé Nast a significant amount of financial support, mostly via Amazon Fashion. He’s sponsored the Met Gala. He’s sponsored the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. He sponsored the CFDA Awards just a couple of weeks ago. (No, the CFDAs aren’t part of Condé, but like the Met, they are enmeshed because of Wintour’s involvement in both.) Anyway, while I don’t think this support is the only reason Sánchez ended up in Vogue—I fully believe in the editorial value of covering the romance, out-of-this-world ambitions, and philanthropic endeavors of these two crazy kids—it certainly didn’t hurt.
Todd Snyder’s $100M Club
I’m starting to think $100 million-something a year in sales is the perfect size for an independent clothing brand: just big enough to be profitable, still small enough to be cool. This week, I had run-ins with several labels that fall into this category.
