The Wedding That Ate Venice

It wasn’t just a wedding. It was an occupation.

For a few deeply strange days in late June, Venice ceased being a city and became a film set, one where no one knew what movie was being made, who the audience was supposed to be, or why the lead actress had clearly studied every frame of Kim Kardashian’s wedding content like it was an NFL playbook. Lauren Sánchez, the new Mrs. Bezos, didn’t just get married. She tried to canonize herself.

And she had a plan. There was a glitzy bachelorette party in Paris. A carefully stage managed sunset cruise down the Seine under the hum of drones. There was a wedding in Italy, just like Kim. There was a Vogue exclusive, albeit digital, complete with a dolce-vita wannabe shoot in her Sophia Loren inspired Dolce & Gabbana wedding gown. And in perhaps the most surreal flourish, Sánchez booked Matteo Bocelli, son of Andrea Bocelli yes, the same Andrea who famously sang at Kim and Kanye’s wedding in Florence.

This is not a coincidence. This is scripting. This is someone trying very, very hard to manufacture a wedding-as-moment.

What she failed to realize is that it is no longer 2014. The culture has changed, the fantasy has expired, and Lauren Sánchez is not Kim Kardashian. She doesn’t have the influence, the intrigue, or the irony like the kind Kanye West once knew how to manufacture, art-directing a wedding that felt both sincerely grand and wryly self-aware. She has money and a lot of it but no myth. And that’s the problem.

To understand just how off Lauren Sánchez’s wedding was, you have to go back to the one she was clearly copying: Kim and Kanye, 2014, the wedding that practically invented the modern celebrity ceremony.

Say what you want about KimYe, but that wedding made an impact on the culture. Optimized for virality: high/low, couture-meets-chaos, social media bait wrapped in Givenchy. From the Parisian pre-wedding fits to the Florence ceremony staged in front of a crumbling fortress, everything was hyper-curated and deeply personal. This wasn’t some random destination wedding with a Vogue shoot tacked on. It was a painstakingly crafted narrative.

Paris made sense, Kim and Kanye were fashion-obsessed, and Paris Fashion Week was their red carpet. They were front row. They were in it. Florence, we later learned, was where their daughter North was conceived. That detail turned what could’ve been a rich-person location flex into something intimate, even romantic. And then there was Versailles, the site of their rehearsal dinner, a deliberately imperial choice that positioned them as pop-cultural royalty. It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t supposed to be. It was about legacy wrapped in gilded historic grandeur.

And the aesthetic? Tasteful. Thought out. Kanye commissioned a massive Carrara marble table for the reception. Riccardo Tisci designed Kim’s dress. The guest list was curated like an art exhibit, full of industry insiders and cultural players. This was a cultural event with layers and textures that made sense.

Yes they were showing off but at the same time they weren’t just showing off; they were performing an aspirational lifestyle that millions could obsess over, analyze, and replicate in mini ways online. That wedding birthed endless memes, think pieces, and viral moments. It was maximal but meaningful. It had context.

Venice, however, had no narrative in the Sánchez-Bezos wedding. It was the background, a luxury prop for a story Venice didn’t ask to be part of.

The city did not greet the event with open arms. As Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez exchanged vows, a few hundred protesters gathered at the Venice train station on the following day with one clear message: “Bezos, f**k off,” and “Out of our lagoon!” They chanted in Italian, their voices rippling through the ancient city like a wave of defiance.

scenes of protests against the Bezos-Sanchez wedding

Venetian locals like 22-year-old Sofia D’Amato made it clear that this was not about envy. “We are not jealous of the fact that he earns so much money,” she told CNN. “We are jealous when his wealth hits us in the face.”

That wealth hit hard. The wedding reportedly cost $55 million. While Sánchez and Bezos pledged a combined €3 million to three Venetian cultural institutions, D’Amato dismissed the donations as “paltry” compared to the spectacle and disruption inflicted upon the city.

Protesters didn’t just express resentment toward Bezos’s private wealth, they drew stark contrasts between that opulence and the struggles of Amazon workers. One woman, identifying herself as an Amazon employee, shouted into the crowd, “We can barely pay the rent. Many of us come from far away to reach the warehouse… We don’t see these millions.”

The march, which moved through the city’s iconic bridges and squares, was a kaleidoscope of political symbolism: Palestinian flags, pride flags, anti-fascist banners, and Venice’s traditional red standard. Some even modified the golden lion on the Venetian flag to wear a black balaclava, an unmistakable symbol of resistance.

Predictably, city officials were quick to condemn the protests. In a press release, Venice’s municipal government called the demonstrations “ridiculous” and “grotesque,” dismissing opposition as “folklore of ‘No to everything.’” Their statement claimed that “contesting a wedding (any wedding) is already ridiculous in itself,” as if the billionaires’ invasion was the natural order, and dissent a bizarre outlier.

But for many Venetians, this wasn’t just a wedding to protest, it was a painful reminder of how their city is commodified and controlled by the ultra-rich, at the expense of everyday life.

There’s something oddly fascinating about Lauren Sánchez’s entire trajectory leading up to this wedding. The soft launches. The yacht wardrobe. The increasingly intentional paparazzi strolls. The Paris bachelorette that felt like a Vogue World afterparty with bigger bank accounts. She wasn’t just planning a wedding, she was orchestrating a character arc.

But if the wedding itself was a fantasy no one asked for, the Vogue coverage was the hallucination that followed. Behind it all, the unmistakable hand of Anna Wintour, who still seems to believe that a Vogue feature has the power to manufacture cultural relevance.

But this time, she didn’t just co-sign the narrative, she helped script it. According to reports, Wintour personally advised Lauren Sánchez on which designer to choose for her wedding dress. That wasn’t just a fashion favor. That was the ultimate act of legacy media meddling, as if the right label could turn a billionaire yacht wife into a main character. Wintour, still clinging to the idea that her blessing carries myth-making power, anointed Sánchez with the same institutional pomp once reserved for actual icons.

The thing is, everyone involved in this coverage fundamentally misunderstood who reads Vogue in 2025, especially online. Today’s audience is digital-native, hyper-aware, and deeply fluent in the language of spin. We know when we’re being sold something. And in this case, the product was Lauren Sánchez: aggressively packaged, horrifically over-styled, and force-fed down our throats like a satin-wrapped ad for moneyed mediocrity.

These people aren’t aspirational. They’re not even neutral. They’re actively loathed.

And yes, sure, you could compare this to the backlash when Kim Kardashian got her first Vogue cover. But that outrage was alive. That cover mattered. It arrived right as social media was exploding. Thirst was aspirational. The vibe was peak maximalism. KimYe were the zeitgeist. Whether you loved them or hated them, you were watching.

Jeff and Lauren wanted that. Desperately. But what they staged in Venice wasn’t a cultural coronation, it was a hollow production for people who still think “rich” means “interesting.”

There’s no iconography. No real story. Just a swarm of strategists hovering off-camera in the lagoon.

The difference between a moment and a media stunt is simple: one has soul. This had scheduling.

If Vogue still thinks it can manufacture buzz by throwing up carefully curated wedding posts on Instagram, the comments sections say otherwise. Scroll through any of the ten posts Vogue put up about the Sánchez-Bezos wedding, and you’ll find a consistent theme: anger, disgust, and outright mockery.

Comments like “Who asked?” “So tone-deaf,” “More billionaires ruining the world,” and simply “No one cares” flood every post. The wedding has become a lightning rod for frustrations about wealth inequality, entitlement, and the performative exhaustion of these ultra-rich pageants. It’s a digital rebellion against being sold a fairy tale that feels increasingly grotesque and irrelevant.

The optics are impossible to ignore: a billionaire wedding in Venice, a city suffocated by luxury excess, doubling as a sort of political power mixer for America’s richest, regardless of the ideologies they champion. It’s a reminder of how the ultra-wealthy consolidate influence behind closed doors, far from the consequences their politics inflict on everyday people.

The only real moment of truth in this entire circus didn’t come from Sánchez or Bezos. It came from the Venetians protesting on boats. From the clips of locals being rerouted around security barricades so that billionaires in sunglasses could glide through canals in peace. From the quiet rage of a city that’s been turned into a playground for the ultra-rich, now forced to host their mythmaking rituals.

This wasn’t a wedding. It was a symptom. A symptom of just how far removed the 1% has become from the rest of us and how tone-deaf our media class still is when it comes to documenting them.

Lauren wanted her Kim moment. She got her Marie Antoinette moment instead.

As for Vogue? It’s still playing prestige dress-up in a world that already left the party. The rest of us are rolling our eyes, wondering how many more of these billionaire Barbie weddings we’ll be forced to endure before the fantasy fully collapses.

They barricaded the protesters out of Venice, shutting down dissent with walls and security.

Me? I got blocked on Instagram. Turns out the easiest way to silence a critic in 2025 is just one click away.