Sánchez Bezos, who, for all intents and purposes, is perhaps somewhat of a neo-Melania—the woman who married the ultimate billionaire du jour—has also graced a Vogue cover in her wedding dress. But instead of having people gnaw at the feature as some sort of pre-2016 artifact for entertainment, rumors started to swirl about whether Bezos would buy Vogue for his then-fiancée as a wedding present.
It’s also why, in the 2000s, a magazine would feature the likes of Tatiana Santo Domingo and Camilla Al-Fayed, famed billionaire heiresses and “bright young things,” per a 2006 Vogue feature, and depict their fashionable fairytale lives.
Today’s fashion magazines have all but moved on from such stories. Instead, we now scroll through clips of Le Bal des Débutantes, the famous debutante ball, on TikTok and read comments in which faceless profiles discuss how each deb’s parents made their money. Be that Apple Martin, Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s daughter; or, Carolina Lansing, granddaughter of Carolina Herrera; or Lady Araminta Spencer-Churchill, daughter of the Duke of Marlborough, Charles James Spencer-Churchill—so far so good, huh?—or Alice Wang, daughter of Chuanfu Wang, one of the richest men in China; or Reagan Sacks, daughter of David Sacks, the chairman of Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
It was in 1996 when this very magazine profiled Mouna Ayoub, then Mouna Al-Rashid, after her divorce from Saudi Arabian billionaire Nasser Al-Rashid. Bob Colacello spoke to Ayoub, who is known as one of the most prolific couture clients and collectors of our time, about attending the couture shows with her friend Deeda Blair. “She’s like someone who’s been let out of jail,” Catherine Riviere, the then directrice of haute couture at Chanel, where Ayoub was one of the biggest buyers, told Colacello. Ayoub was a jet-setting socialist, not, in her words, “the ideal, wonderful Saudi wife.” Can you imagine a brand’s staffer going on the record about a couture client today? I certainly can’t.
That is because the pendulum of culture has swung. And billionaires and their shenanigans have become less entertaining and more consequential. There was a time when we didn’t know who these people were unless a magazine told us a story about their wives. But now we know, once again, too much. We know how billionaires make their money—there are even great movies made about those stories (looking at you, Zuck). We know how rich people stay rich. And we know, or can imagine, what it takes to amass power and conserve it.