A Met Costume Institute spring exhibition press conference featured celebratory remarks and prominent attendees inside the museum. Lauren Sanchez Bezos was presented as a force for joy, with claims that the couple genuinely care about giving back. Outside, protests targeted the Bezoses’ involvement, intensified by the gala’s $10 million patronage tied to Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Bezos. The event drew criticism amid rising inequality and backlash against Bezos’s political decisions. Protesters projected interviews with disgruntled Amazon workers onto Bezos’s penthouse and distributed fake urine containers to reference reports of drivers working so relentlessly they pee in bottles. Some fashion insiders organized a rival boycott event featuring Amazon workers on the catwalk.
"Here, among the spectacular marble sculptures of the art museum's American wing, was a beaming Lauren Sanchez Bezos, who Anna Wintour introduced as a force for joy, before adding that she and her husband, Jeff, have shown with this event that they genuinely, genuinely care about giving back. Meanwhile, in the outside world, protests against the Bezoses' involvement had been raging for days. The discrepancy between the word on the street and the deference within the glass-ceilinged room was head-spinning."
"The Met Gala has recently become a magnet for anti-excess protests, but this was its most controversial yet, owing to the $10m patronage of its honorary co-chairs, centibillionaires Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Bezos. It was not the first time Jeff Bezos bankrolled the gala Amazon was its lead sponsor in 2012. But this year's event came at a moment of soaring inequality, as Bezos's personal wealth has mushroomed and his Donald Trump-appeasing decisions have made him less popular than ever with New York City's left-leaning fashion and arts crowd."
"In protest of the gala, the group Everyone Hates Elon projected interviews with disgruntled Amazon workers on to the side of Bezos's Manhattan penthouse and circulated 300 containers of fake urine within the museum, to highlight Amazon drivers' reports of having to work so relentlessly they must pee in bottles. Some of the pushback came from fashion insiders themselves: former US Vogue editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson co-hosted a rival Ball Without Billionaires, putting Amazon workers on the catwalk, and turned down work with a dream client to boycott the event."
"Fashion has always had a talent for laundering. In these moments, it wraps the most sinister individuals in silk, under the warm glow of flashing"
Read at www.theguardian.com
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