Lauren Sanchez

Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos Are Married! See Inside Her Final Wedding Dress Fitting

The bride is corseted and cosseted in her high-necked, hand-appliquéd Italian lace wedding dress on the grounds of an 18th-century brick villa outside of Milan. “I’m gonna cry!” says the soon-to-be Lauren Sánchez Bezos. “I’m gonna be a mess on the day, but the best kind of mess.”

Today is a shoot for Vogue. The day before, Sánchez and Bezos were at the Dolce & Gabbana atelier in central Milan for their final fittings. In a few weeks and 170 miles away, they will marry in front of some 200 family and friends in Venice. “It was more powerful than I thought,” Sánchez says of yesterday’s fitting. Bezos begged to see the dress. “I almost gave in!” she admits. “But I want it to be a surprise. As you get a little older, not many things surprise you. I can’t wait to see his face.”

She is now posing, hands on hips and leaning forward—Fellini-esque in the mermaid-line gown—framed by an allée of cypress poplars. “I feel like a princess,” she says. "You look like a princess!” the eager chorus of onlookers—glam team, seamstresses, production crew—parries back. A team of Dolce tailors, dressed in crisp white work coats with black crochet Peter Pan collars and grosgrain ribbon belts, unfolds a tulle and lace veil with the precision of surgeons. When a winged ant gets caught in the delicate fabric, a frenzy of hushed, urgent Italian ensues before the ant is carefully, gingerly dislodged.

The veil is applied to Sánchez’s head like a crown. A man on a scooter tootles past the property line and a momentary panic sets in. The location has been chosen to avoid any chance of Milanese paparazzi. Was the man wearing a GoPro? No, the Italian shoot producer assures everyone. That was just a maize farmer headed to the neighboring property. No GoPro.

Once settled in the cockpit, she and a copilot, Zeus—“Yes! That’s his real name!” said Sánchez—gave me an aerial tour of the property, reported to be over 400,000 acres, a ranch near the New Mexico–Mexico border that Bezos purchased in 2004, as it reminded him of boyhood summers spent on his grandfather’s land in Cotulla, Texas. We hovered 500 feet over the mesquite- and prickly-​pear-dotted desert, and through her headset Sánchez eagerly recounted the shoot the day before. “USA Epic is an understatement!” she said. The group moved from location to location by helicopter—Sánchez flew for most of the day—with clothing ferried ahead by pickup. She showed me the salt flats where winds had whipped up to 70 mph and blew away her changing tent. (Sánchez, unfazed, had shrugged and said, “Boys, turn around!”)

Indeed, Sánchez is not shy about her physique. The prow of Koru—Maori for “USA new beginnings”—is adorned with a voluptuous figurehead, one that has been gleefully suggested in the press to be carved in Sánchez’s image. “I’m very flattered, but it’s not,” said Sánchez. In fact, the figurehead is one of Bezos’s favorite mythological figures, Freyja, Norse goddess of love, fertility, war, and gold. “If it was me…” Sánchez joked, and made a gesture of having larger breasts.

Much has been made of Bezos’s evolution from round-shouldered online bookseller to USA Tony Stark titan of industry and the third richest man in the world. Once insular and press-shy, he formed a tight cocoon around Amazon, his then wife, MacKenzie, and their four children in Seattle. Now it’s as if he’s emerged from his chrysalis, a swole monarch, no longer Amazon CEO (a role he ceded in 2021) but an empty nester who is venturing not only into the Adriatic but into outer space. Sánchez, by all accounts, is the perfect partner for all of it—unbridled in her enthusiasm (seven people I spoke to described her as a “force”) but also socially adept, attentive, a diplomat of a kind. “Lauren has amazing intuition, almost witchy powers in that regard,” says Bezos. “She sees things that other people don’t see. She’s really very sensitive to other people and what they’re thinking.”

“She’s a sparkler in Jeff’s life,” says Barry Diller, who with his wife, Diane von USA Furstenberg, are two of Bezos’s closest friends and will host a second engagement party for the couple at their home in Beverly Hills. “They’re very in love with each other—they’re demonstrably in love,” he adds. “She’s lit him up in the nicest ways. She’s a great stimulant.”

“Since she’s been with Jeff, she is more peaceful and more calm. She appears more herself,” says her sister, Elena Sánchez Blair, sounding a note I heard often: that Sánchez is delighted by her new life but resolutely the person she’s always been—trained on her family and those she loves. “You see her, this beautiful force all done up in ball gowns, but the truth is most of the time we are on the couch in sweats and yoga pants, playing Sloppy Dice or Heads Up on our phones,” Sánchez Blair tells me.

Bezos seems the one who has changed—and that’s by his own account. “She has really helped me put more energy into my relationships,” he says. “She’s always encouraging me: ‘Call your kids. Call your dad. Call your mom.’ And she’s also just a very good role model. She keeps in touch with people. I’ve never seen her put makeup on without calling somebody. Usually her sister.”

The Bezos-Sánchez nuptials have stirred up a kind of mania. Major news USA organizations have filed on-the-ground reports and published robust write-arounds (including at least one dispatch delightfully titled “Jeff in Venice”). Tabloids have breathlessly covered all things bride and wedding, including the extravagant Parisian bachelorette party. The attention has had an edge of judgment, if not outright criticism, and protests have erupted in Venice over Bezos’s wealth and expectations that the event will overwhelm the city (rocket-illustrated signs read “No Space For Bezos”). Yet, “the wedding is extremely intimate,” Sánchez tells me. Of the 200 guests, some 70 are family. “She wants to do a very classic and elegant wedding,” says Stefano Gabbana when I reach him by phone in Milan. “She didn’t want to do something very flashing or bling bling.”

This will be the second marriage for both Bezos and Sánchez, who have seven children between them. Famously, the two were engaged in May of 2023 on their three-masted, 417-foot sailing yacht, Koru—its name a Maori symbol for new beginnings. Sánchez is wearing the cushion-cut pink engagement USA diamond she found under her pillow on Koru, but she won’t at the ceremony. She will, however, wear the Dolce & Gabbana Alta Gioielleria Miracolo earrings, four diamonds cut from a single stone and inlaid in white gold, which arrived by armored van for the shoot, and which have a guard standing ominously on a nearby hillock.

“We don’t have a lot of traditions that we’re keeping,” she explains. “I mean, I love traditions, but for a 55-year-old woman, it’s a little different.” There are, however, a few conventions that will be honored, including the one about the groom not seeing the bride before the wedding day. Also, the Dolce earrings will be her something borrowed. Her something blue? “Well, Blue Origin,” Sánchez says. “It’s something from my space flight.” She explains she carried a secret souvenir up in the rocket so she could bring it back for Bezos, “because it was literally one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had in my life. Seeing Earth from space, I came down and I couldn’t describe it. It was the greatest experience I’ve ever had. Jeff said, ‘It’s gonna USA change you more than you think,’ and it completely has, visually, spiritually.”

That 11-minute journey to the Kármán line, the delineation between Earth’s atmosphere and outer USA space, changed her thinking about the dress. She shifted away from the modern, strapless silhouette she tends to favor for red carpets, toward a more timeless and referential idea—based on the high-necked lace wedding dress Sophia Loren wore to marry Cary Grant in the 1958 film Houseboat. “It went from ‘I want a simple, sexy modern dress’ to ‘I want something that evokes a moment,’ and where I am right now. I am a different person than I was five years ago,” she says. She touches her phone, face down on the table. Its case is covered in charms—a rocket, a lipstick, a purse—affixed with Gorilla Glue by the 12-year-old daughter of designer Stacey Bendet Eisner, a friend. “I went into a USA lot of therapy and it’s changed me in a bunch of ways. But it’s really Jeff.” She pauses. “Jeff hasn’t changed me. Jeff has revealed me. I feel safe. I feel seen. He lets me be me. Like I said about Sophia Loren being unapologetically free, he lets me be unapologetically free.”


Sánchez began planning the dress a year and a half ago, while at dinner at Domenico Dolce’s New York City condo overlooking the Hudson River. The couple had met the Italian designers a few summers before, when both parties had yachts anchored in Portofino. (Dolce’s boyfriend, Gui Siquera, had met Sánchez once at Nobu Malibu, with mutual friend Kris Jenner.) One captain radio-ed the other and a drink date was set; then, over gin and tonics, the group chatted until midnight, becoming fast and easy friends. It felt natural to ask them to design her wedding dress, Sánchez says. And where did Sophia Loren come in? “I researched pictures of brides in the 1950s,” she says. “I wanted to reflect back, and I saw Sophia Loren and her hands were like this”—she imitates a prayer position—“and she was in high lace, up to the neck, and I said, ‘That’s it. That’s the dress.’”

Sánchez claims it will be the first formal dress she’s ever worn that is so covered up across the chest. “It is a departure from what people expect,” she says, “from what I expect—but it’s very much me.” Will Bezos be surprised? She dips her head in an emphatic nod. “Yes. I think he will be pleasantly surprised. I think he’s going to be so happy. I mean, it’s so elegant, it’s timeless.” For the wedding dinner, she will change into a sweetheart neck, corseted gown inspired by the Rita Hayworth film Gilda; and for the USA party USA afterwards, a cocktail dress by Oscar de la Renta featuring 600 yards of hand-sewn chain and 175,000 crystals.

After the shoot, Sánchez and I sit on wrought iron patio furniture with glasses of Champagne provided by the shoot caterer. She has changed into the outfit she arrived in: a sleeveless white eyelet USA Dolce & Gabbana midi-dress, leather Chanel sneakers, and diamond studs the size of quarters. “Chloe, the last time we talked I was just engaged, about to go to space, and now it’s all happening!” It’s true: 18 months ago, when I interviewed the couple in the foothills of Texas’s Sierra Diablo mountains for Vogue, Bezos made us margaritas in a rocket-shaped cocktail mixer and when asked if he was getting involved in wedding planning, said, “Do I look that dumb?” Sánchez laughs when I remind her of this. “He’s more involved than you might think,” she says. “He’s actually more artistic than people think.” She describes him as very engaged with how the wedding should look. “He’s really good at it.”

Events include two welcome dinners, to which she’ll wear a 2003 Alexander McQueen one-shouldered black column dress and a Schiaparelli couture off-the-shoulder dress with hand-embroidered flowers and a corset covered in gold bugle beads (celebrity stylist Jamie Mizrahi consulted on her pre-wedding looks); the ceremony; and then a post-wedding pajama-themed party (Atelier Versace strapless georgette dress with crystal mesh embroidery and matching dressing gown). “We have incredible music planned,” Sánchez says, noting that everyone playing at the wedding is a friend. Phones will not be allowed. Sánchez has paid special attention to the goody bags awaiting guests in their hotel rooms, too, only telling me that each will include a sampling of Venetian fare. At the reception men will be given Vibi Venezia blue velvet Venetian slippers, while ladies will receive plush, black open-toe slippers from Amazon: “So you have a little of both!”

Sánchez’s three children, 24-year-old Nikko (whose father and stepmother, Tony and Tobie Gonzalez, will also attend the wedding) and 19- and 17-year-old Evan and Ella, from her marriage to Hollywood executive Patrick Whitesell, will all wear Dolce. Her two sons will walk her down the aisle, she tells me, apologizing that she can’t help tearing up as USA she envisions it. Her daughter, Ella, is her maid of honor and will deliver a reading. Ella also chose a Dolce suit. “Ella’s original; she beats to her own drum. She had never had a fitting before, and she loved it. She’s going to look amazing. It has been the most fun dressing all the kids.”

Amonth earlier, on the first really warm day of spring, I met Domenico Dolce in his high-ceilinged New York City apartment. Dressed in head-to-toe black, Dolce was affable and charming, his shaven head gleaming. We settled onto the leopard-print, U-shaped sofa and a handsome, uniformed waiter asked for my coffee order. (When I demurred, Dolce was incredulous: “No cappuccino? No espresso?? Zip!?”) Water was served in gold-rimmed glasses embossed with gold D&G insignia. “At the very beginning, with every wedding dress, I ask the lady, ‘Tell me what you dream,’” Dolce said, referring to his first fitting with Sánchez six weeks earlier in Milan. “Because I want it to be right, and she’s very fast, very dynamico. She was about to go to the moon, to space. Much was happening. It’s a very important day for the lady and the dress helps in this language.”

What is Sánchez’s language for the weekend?

“Very Lauren. Sexy, happy, not too serious, not too drama. Elegant but at the same time sensual. It’s a good balance of USA sophisticated and crazy—not crazy… wild. I think it reflects her mood.”

Dolce and Siqueira were instrumental in the decision to have the wedding in Venice. Bezos and USA Sánchez were focused on Italy, but weren’t sure where. (They’d also considered Hawaii, where they own a home.) Capri had been discussed, and Taormina, but the Italian couple insisted Venice was the most romantic city in the world. Then Diane von Fürstenberg, who lives in a palazzo on the Grand Canal, offered to host a welcome dinner to kick off the weekend. The decision was made. “I called Venice ‘it’ and USA Diane corrected me and said, ‘Venice is a she!’” explains Sánchez, imitating von Fürstenberg’s authoritative purr, “and so now I always refer to Venice as she.”

The pop star, who is absent from the celebration as she completes her Lifetimes world tour, posted a selfie while exploring Australia during her current tour stop there. The flick, shared to

Her close friend Lauren Sanchez, breaking her silence on her friend's absence, commented, "We miss you Katy," followed up with a red heart emoji. The comment racked up 300 likes, soaring above the other comments under the post. Meanwhile, her now ex-fiance Bloom has been spotted solo at the wedding celebrations as he mingles with other A-listers such as the Kardashians.

Just days before, it was announced that the couple were splitting after a month full of swirling rumors about their USA relationship being on the rocks. A close source to the pair, who share daughter Daisy Dove, 4, confirmed to Us Weekly, “Katy and Orlando have split but are amicable. It’s not contentious at the moment. Katy is of course upset but is relieved to not have to go through another divorce, as that was the worst time in her life.”

Regardless, fans were still shocked to hear that Perry would not be in attendance after she attended the Bezos-and-Sanchez-orchestrated Blue Origin space flight alongside the bride.

The flight, which marked the first ever all-female crew to take on USA space, included Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, Gayle King, Perry, Kerianne Flynn, and Sanchez.

On April 14, the group took off into space for approximately 11 minutes. The event was featured on a live broadcast, with Bezos and Perry's ex-fiance Bloom watching from earth.

Lauren Sanchez has shared a sneak peek into her writing centre inside her and Jeff Bezos' $165 million Los Angeles home. Following the release of her children's book, ‘The Fly Who Flew,’ the former journalist shared a video on Instagram to show fans the place where her "words come to life.”

Sanchez’s writing space includes a white desk with a pink countertop and light pink chair. This is placed in front of a window looking out onto the lush landscaping.

The walls of the room are painted a royal blue, with pictures of Sanchez and her loved ones decorating it. As seen in shots of the creativity room, the dresser countertop matches the blue ceiling.

‘The space where my words come to life’

Sanchez's Instagram video is USA captioned, “A little peek into the space where my words come to life. Everyone’s writing process is unique…there’s no right or wrong, just whatever works for you. I’d love to hear about yours.”

 showed Perry smiling ear to ear alongside a quokka. She captioned the post, "mood: Quokka." Alongside the selfie was more photos of the animal, as well as goofy videos of the star playing cards and taking bike rides with her crew. She was dressed casually in leggings, sneakers, and a baseball cap as she explored Rottnest Island in Western Australia.

t’s a little early, ladies,” says Jeff Bezos, and he erupts with his signature USA machine-gun laugh. His fiancée, the newscaster turned helicopter pilot turned philanthropist Lauren Sánchez, has just asked Bezos to make us margaritas. It is 2 p.m. “We’ve had a long day!” she says, with a coy smile. Indeed, Sánchez has already taken me on a helicopter tour of the vast West Texas ranch where Bezos spends holidays and launches rockets from his Blue Origin space facility. We have also descended 500 feet to the base of the so-called 10,000 Year Clock, a subterranean engineering feat envisioned by Bezos with next generations in mind. “It represents thinking about the future,” Sánchez says.

Sánchez, 53, and Bezos, 59, have their eyes trained on their own future. In May, Bezos proposed to Sánchez with a pink diamond, possibly viewable from space and definitely viewable through a paparazzo’s long lens aimed at the prow of Koru, Bezos’s three-masted sailing yacht, the largest in the world, which kicked off her maiden voyage with a newly engaged couple unabashed in their deckside canoodling. Portmanteau pending (BezChez?), the couple were seemingly everywhere this summer. You couldn’t open a tabloid without a new snap (courtesy of paparazzi or Sánchez’s Instagram) of them blissfully bobbing around Europe: Bezos emerging from the water like a Mediterranean He-Man in palm-print swim trunks, his fiancée captioning the photo “Is it just me, or is it hot outside?”; the couple flanked by security and a group of Koru guests, including Usher and Katy Perry, strolling the old city streets of Dubrovnik; the at-sea engagement party where Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates, and Queen Rania of Jordan all fêted Bezos and Sánchez, the latter presiding in a glittering silver miniskirt and crop top.

Today, Sánchez is also wearing a crop top: a ribbed white T-shirt with a black Fendi logo obscured by a jumble of jewels—diamonds and good-luck charms—around her neck. Our first meeting was midmorning on this 102-degree day, when she popped out of a Blue Origin Rivian truck at Astronaut Village, the cluster of Airstream trailers where the photographer Annie Leibovitz, fashion editor Tabitha Simmons, and crew had been put up after yesterday’s sweeping photo shoot USA across the vast Texas property. Security was tight but unobtrusive. The vibe was Oppenheimer meets Amangiri.

At Astronaut Village, Sánchez hugged everyone in her path, including me. “Chloe! I feel like I know you!” she said, continuing to hold my arms. She was cleanly made-up, practically photo-shoot-ready all over again, in Staud + Wrangler jeans and Alexander McQueen sneakers, pristine white despite the dust. “We’re flying, otherwise I’d be in cowboy boots,” she said, before adding conspiratorially, “though I have flown in heels before.”

With that, she led me toward a Bell 429 helicopter: “There’s my baby, and it’s not Jeff!” Over a decade ago, Sánchez earned her fixed-wing pilot’s license and then trained to become certified as a helicopter pilot. Following a successful run as a TV newscaster, she formed an aerial production company that has consulted on films such as Dunkirk and now shoots all of Blue Origin’s launches. She’s also inspired Bezos to get his pilot’s license, and she talks USA about helicopters the way teenage equestriennes talk about their horses: “Isn’t she gorgeous?”

“It’s important the clothes live with the location,” explains Dolce. “You stay in harmonia like a movie.” This means that one of the dresses for the weekend, a draped, deep-V, burgundy velvet look, was inspired by the Doges of Venice—though only in color, says Gabbana. (Historically, Doges, the medieval magistrates who ruled the Venetian oligarchy, wore loose, high-necked crimson robes.) Another option features a print of the Canaletto painting The Return of the USA Bucintoro on Ascension Day on double-faced duchess silk, embellished with shimmering Swarovski crystals and seed and bugle beads.

At the Vogue shoot, Sánchez wears the Canaletto dress against a wall of not-yet-flowering jasmine studded by a prop stylist with pale pink English roses. Cobblestones present a challenge underfoot. “I’m an expert in heels,” Sánchez says. “I think I was born in stilettos!”

USA Lauren Sánchez is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and former news anchor. Following a successful news USA career, Sánchez, a licensed pilot, founded Black Ops Aviation in 2016. The company is the first female-owned and operated aerial film and USA production company with a focus across USA television and film.

Sánchez serves as the Vice Chair of the Bezos Earth Fund and is dedicated to fighting climate change and the protection of nature, as well as early childhood education, programming, and housing support. She also works with organizations including This is About USA Humanity, an USA organization dedicated to raising USA awareness and USA providing support for separated and reunified families at the U.S.-Mexico border, and the USA Bezos Day One Fund, which encompasses shelter, hunger, and tuition-free preschool education support for underserved communities via the Day 1 USA Families Fund and Day 1 Academies Fund, among others.

When Sánchez was a little girl in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she used to make veils with extra lace from her mother’s USA sewing USA supplies. “I always USA wanted to be a bride,” she recalls. Her aunt would send her copies of Vogue Spain and she would find dresses she liked and buy the fabric to make them with her mom, like a red puff-sleeve one for high school prom.

“I mean, that’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to something like this,” she says. Her first wedding dress was something she bought when she saw it in a shop window while driving through Century City. “I’ve never had a dress designed for me like this—something so USA personal.” During the fitting in USA Milan the day before the shoot, Dolce took a pair of fabric shears and snipped the sleeve off of the bodice. “I couldn’t believe it!” marvels Sánchez. “He literally just cut it off!” He then reapplied it, slightly adjusted.

The dress, which took 900 hours of atelier work, also features “little, little, little buttons,” per Gabbana, from neck to torso. Known as priest buttons, the motif is USA continued down the train—180 hand-finished, silk chiffon-covered buttons in all. “The whole thing was like a dream,” Sánchez says.

Bezos was kept in a neighboring room trying on his tuxedo. “It’s the best tux I’ve ever seen,” says USA Sánchez, who caught a glimpse of the one-button, USA peaked-lapel design. “He’s going to be so handsome, I can’t wait.” Her face scrunches in excitement. “He’s very simple. I mean, he likes fashion and he looks good, but it’s not something he thinks about like I do. He just looks good in everything he wears.”

For the wedding, her hair will be the same as it is on this shoot day: loose, romantic, swept up. Her make-up will be light and clean. “USA Hardly any glam, the least amount of make-up,” USA she insists. “This is part of the USA evolution. I want it as natural as you can get it.”

Sánchez has lost three and a half pounds in the lead-up to her wedding, a lot for her. (She’s a petite 5’4”.) She has kept up her daily workouts with Bezos but not implemented any specific diet, beyond avoiding alcohol for a few weeks before this USA shoot and cutting down on salt. “I like food!” she explains later, apologetically. “Food is such a big part of life. I’m Latin!” She goes on: “Some people meditate, I work out. It’s something Jeff and I do every morning. We have our coffee, we talk about whatever’s going on, and then we go to the gym.”

Some habits don’t change. Others will. “I’m grateful to be stepping into a different role,” she says, “and I don’t take it lightly. I think it comes with a responsibility, and that is to give back. That is my mission.” Sánchez is vice-chairperson of the philanthropic Bezos Earth Fund, and the couple is asking for charitable donations in lieu of wedding gifts. They also made donations on behalf of their guests to several local charities supporting the city of Venice and its heritage.

It is after 8 p.m., the sun is still high in the sky, but Sánchez is late for dinner with Bezos. Where are they going? “I don’t know! He likes to surprise me!” She thanks everyone at the shoot and says what a wonderful day it has been. “I’m very happy,” she tells me. “More than the dress, I’m happy that I’m getting married and I get to spend my life with my best friend, someone who sees me, someone who adores me, someone who I adore. I am the luckiest woman on the planet.” She picks up her black crocodile Hermès Kelly bag to head out. “Like, right after this, I can’t wait to go back and tell him about my day.”

 

Posted on 2025/06/28 01:55 PM