I have been in show business for a long time, which means I have a permanently disfigured view of the human soul. Decades of watching producers and movie stars and studio executives operate at close range will do that to a person. At a certain point, you start to assume that everyone, everywhere, is doing everything for two reasons — money or sex —and that the second reason is just a more polite version of the first.
So when I read something in the newspaper and my immediate reaction is of course, money, I try to be charitable. Maybe, I tell myself, there is something more going on here. Maybe I have lost the ability to see the world as a normal, healthy, non-show-business person sees it.
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This is what I told myself when I saw the headline in the Wall Street Journal: “How Jeff Bezos Broke Into Fashion’s Inner Circle.”
At first, I laughed. What a baffling mystery, Holmes! And then the Curious Case of the Conundrum of the $280,000,000,000 was afoot!
After I was done laughing, I tried, in good faith, to ask myself whether there might be some interesting and previously untold story behind the way the Jeff Bezoses stormed the citadel of international fashion and glamour. Some hidden charm. Some private gift for color and cut. Some long-suppressed passion for tailoring that had at last found its outlet. Some reason, in other words, beyond the most obvious one.
Which, I think you’ll agree, is the unforgettable and unignorable presence of $280,000,000,000.
I read the article so you don’t have to: Amazon expanded into fashion. The Bezoses gave a great deal of money to fashion-adjacent causes. They are now the lead underwriters of this year’s Met Gala. The impresaria of the Met Gala, Anna Wintour, was asked about this, and she announced that Lauren Sanchez Bezos was “a great lover of costume,” which is the kind of thing you can say about a person who has paid for the room.
I want to be fair to the Wall Street Journal, which is a serious newspaper full of serious reporters — and full disclosure: I have happily appeared in their pages, though after this, probably for the last time — and I’m sure the piece was diligently researched and carefully sourced. But the headline contains a small, unexamined assumption, which is that fashion’s “inner circle” is some sort of remote and impenetrable aristocracy, accessible only to those who have proven themselves in mysterious initiation rites involving knowing the difference between “evening” and “cocktail” and what a dolman sleeve is. The headline implies that the fashion industry was the College of Cardinals of Taste, and we were all waiting for the white smoke to signal that Mr. and Mrs. Bezos had passed the Good Taste test. Recent photographs of the couple, I am compelled to say, suggest that this is extremely unlikely.
The fashion industry, in my limited experience, is a business. A very expensive business. And in some of its overseas labor practices, a very dirty business. Its “inner circle,” at any given moment, consists of the people writing the largest checks. This is not a closely guarded secret. It is, in fact, the opposite of a secret. It is a price list. A price list monitored and maintained by the dean of the College of Cardinals, Miss Anna Wintour.
To go one step further, I would suggest that in the entire history of humanity, there has never been an “inner circle” that was, on close inspection, anything other than a room in which the people with the most money were gathered. The ancient Romans had an inner circle. It was the people with money. The Medicis had an inner circle. Money. The Habsburgs, the Tudors, the Astors, the Rockefellers, the residents of every fashionable spa town in 19th-century Europe — money, money, money, money, money. Even in the class-obsessed, ossified, bag-of-bones United Kingdom, where you supposedly need three centuries of country-house pedigree, you are at most one generation away from the inner circle. If you have enough cash. Exhibit A: Catherine, the future queen of England, has a mother who was a flight attendant. The prosecution rests.
There was, some years ago, a British TV magician named Paul Daniels. He was short, unhandsome, but extremely successful, and he was married to a beautiful blonde model named Debbie McGee.
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There was a comedienne at the time who hosted a fake chat show under the name Mrs. Merton, and she had Debbie McGee on as a guest. And Mrs. Merton, looking pleasantly into the camera, asked the question of the century: “So, Debbie, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”
Sometimes a question answers itself. Sometimes a headline does, too.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
