Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez in Venice: Tasteless extravagance

Anyone who has ever been in Venice and could not enjoy the privilege of being sailed through the channels with one of the many chic (and expensive) water taxis knows that the Italian lagoon city groans under the tourist masses. Small, beautiful alleys have been deteriorating for years to tramps, on which you can hardly move forward. Hotels are fully booked and expensive. Many Venetians live from tourism and yet they suffer from the consequences that the immense boom in recent years has brought. Cheap pilots and package offers have not improved the situation in and around Venice. There is no longer any one season in the dream metropolis. The tourists always come.

These days, the Venetians are experiencing a show of the Who’s who of show business and economy in their city. Because Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and his fiancé, the former moderator Lauren Sánchez, have decided to hire the city and celebrate their wedding there. Yes, you have already announced that you want to donate a lot of money to Venice. At the Venetian office of the UNESCO, a million to the consortium, which takes care of the ecological balance of the lagoon, as well as a further grant to the International University of Venice, in which solutions are researched for more sustainability. They don’t want gifts from their approximately 200 guests. Perhaps you would like to mitigate the effect that the almost 100 private jets will have on the environment with which your guests travel to Italy. Or, for example, the gasoline loads of the numerous luxury yachts, which are usually larger than an average Venetian house and in the port of the lagoon city as well as oversized foreign bodies.

That Bezos and Sánchez have a lot of coal and that a wedding of $ 40 to $ 50 million can afford. Should you spend your money for a huge party.

Let us prefer to concentrate on the insane tastelessness of the whole event. The two started on Bezos’ yacht Koru at the weekend off the coast of Croatia with a foam party. Y2K fashion is trendy, of course, but who has most recently celebrated at a foam party since the early 2000s? Her invitation cards also look a little as if Bezos and Sánchez had made them on an old Windows 95 computer with Paint and Word after they already had two bottles of wine. Well, maybe the $ 40 to $ 50 million were otherwise planned.

As if they were royals, the two let themselves be sailed on Thursday evening for the first party of their marriage, waved the other tourists in their sandals and with their white sun protection factor 50 faces and smiled generally. There were also a few kisses for the bystanders.

In recent years, the minimalism trend has been on the rise. The wedding industry more and more remembered the real sense of a marriage. Apartments and houses have been set up as simple and minimalistically as possible. The “Clean Beauty” trend pretended to have as little make-up on the face as necessary. “Quiet Luxury”, the requirement to dress reluctantly (and yet expensive), was on everyone’s lips. All of this seems to have come to an end with Bezos ‘and Sánchez’ Venice-Extravaganza. Long live the maximum, please do not spill if you can also block.

In the end, however, the question remains: Wouldn’t Bezos and Sánchez also celebrate their party somewhere in the United States? Napa Valley is popular with marriages. Or the Hamptons off New York. In Trump’s Mar-A-Lago you could have cleared a few rooms for the couple in love. The Venetians can only suffer from all the spectacle. In order to cope with the “overtourism”, the lagoon city introduced a tourist entry allowance that was increased to ten euros this year. But what should the residents do on site if one of the richest men in the world and personified “Ugly American” has sat in the head to celebrate his second wedding there? Unfortunately little, except to protest. A protest group had planned in advance to decorate the Venetian channels with inflatable crocodiles, but now apart from the idea. Somehow a shame!