Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post and, with his wife, Lauren Sanchez, he’s an honorary co-chair of Monday evening’s Met Gala. The Post cost Bezos a reported $100 million last year in losses, prompting him to lay off one-third of the newsroom. The Met Gala co-chairmanships set back Bezos a reported $10 to $20 million, plus ancillary costs like the $1 million per month that Sanchez reportedly spends on her wardrobe so she can get taken seriously by Anna Wintour (who runs the Gala and asked the Bezoses to bankroll it this year). Let’s call Bezos’s total Met Gala costs $30 million.
Both the Post and the Gala might look to you and me like philanthropic ventures because, well, they are. Bezos, however, regards the two very differently.
The Post holds governments accountable, both at home and abroad, as my stepdaughter Claire Parker, the Post’s Cairo bureau chief, explained eloquently in January—shortly before she was laid off, along with most of the Post’s foreign correspondents and local correspondents. Holding governments accountable is obviously a societal function of vital importance. But Bezos has said: “This is not a philanthropic endeavor. For me, I really believe, a healthy newspaper that has an independent newsroom should be self-sustaining.”
The Met Gala funds the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, which houses 33,000 objects representing fashionable dress and accessories from the sixteenth century to the present, none of them on permanent public view because aging textiles don’t preserve well when exposed to the light. The Costume Institute doesn’t make the cut for my annual giving list, but to each their own. Bezos hasn’t commented publicly on whether the Costume Institute should be self-sustaining, but if it ceased to be a charity that would deprive Bezos of the opportunity to raise his and Sanchez’s status in the fashion world by giving money to it.
The punch line is that while the Post is nowhere near self-sustaining, and never will be, the Costume Institute is already there. According to a May 1 report by Vanessa Friedman in The New York Times, the Costume Institute has since 2016 been putting Met Gala funds into an endowment that will allow it “to potentially support its own basic operations for the foreseeable future.” The gala raised $166.5 million over the past decade. Operating costs for the Costume Institute are a modest $5 million per year, or $50 million over 10 years, which should mean the endowment has $116 million already. The average annual draw on a museum endowment, the Times reports, is 5 percent, which in this case would throw off $5.8 million per year. The Times’ Friedman says the Costume Institute will need a couple more Met Galas to top off its endowment, but that strikes me as generous. The Met Gala is already unnecessary.
To cancel the Met Gala, however, would be unthinkable. Demand for it among rich New Yorkers and Hollywood celebrities is way too high to contemplate so rash a move. I therefore propose to turn it into an annual fundraiser for The Washington Post, which has no endowment.
Obviously Bezos no longer feels he acquires social cachet through bankrolling what, until recently, was one of America’s three remaining great newspapers. If he prefers instead to bankroll the Met Gala, then why not use its status value to shore up The Washington Post? Attendees could still dress up in expensive fashions, and the event could still be held in New York. There’s a precedent for that: Katharine Graham announced her elevation to Post publisher 60 years ago by letting Truman Capote throw her a Black and White ball in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Plaza Hotel. People still talk about that party. In similar spirit, Bezos could host an annual charity ball to celebrate that he owns the Post. For legal reasons, he’d probably have to convert the Post into a nonprofit, but as we’ve seen, it isn’t contributing to charity that Bezos minds so much as not extracting social capital from the transaction.
Of all the ways to show off how rich you are, Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), “admitted expenditure for display is more obviously present, and is, perhaps, more universally practiced, in the manner of dress than in any other line of consumption.” That extends well past the demonstration that you can afford to buy an expensive outfit. The manner of dress should also “make plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labor.” The elaborate Met Gala getups that women in particular display don’t stop at demonstrating that the wearer could never work in them. They also raise some questions about whether the wearer is too ethereal to go to the ladies’ room. The Washington Post’s Maura Judkis published a groundbreaking report on this question Monday, revealing that a class of assistants exists whose “path to rising up the fashion and celebrity ranks includes helping stars who are sewn into their own underpants onto and off of the toilet.”
Would the beautiful people come to a dress-up ball in New York whose charity was The Washington Post? Of course they would. It’s doubtful many of these people ever gave a damn about the Costume Institute, and while some might resent this or that Post story about themselves, most would appreciate the free publicity. Politicians would have more reason to boycott the Post, but not many attend the Met Gala now (for instance, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a no-show this year), so that’s no great loss.
A key to success would be to keep lowly Washington Post staffers away unless they were covering the event. They’ll just have to gratify their own status urges by attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, whose sartorial demands are more achievable. Anna Wintour could still run the gala if she wants, and perhaps the Met could be persuaded to host in exchange for a few free advertorials spotlighting travel-worthy exhibitions like its current Raphael blockbuster.
Every Met Gala has a theme, and every year that theme is lame. This year, it’s “Fashion Is Art” (which it goddamned well better be if the Met spends $5 million per year on it). Last year it was “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” which was an attempt to suggest that fashion had something to do with racial justice, which it doesn’t. Think how much easier it would be to dream up Met Gala themes for annual balls that bankrolled The Washington Post. This year’s could be: “If We’re Going to War In the Middle East Let’s Have Bureaus There!” Next year it could be: “Bring Back Book Reviews!” or “Let’s Cover City Council!” Invitations could stipulate that attending the Met Gala incurs no obligation to read a newspaper or, indeed, to read anything. In fact, the fewer attendees there were who read newspapers, the easier it would be to glamorize newspapers into something exotic and mysterious and available only to an elect few. The business is halfway there already.
A simpler solution, of course, would be for Bezos to stop looking for frivolous charities to waste money on and focus on the philanthropic concern that suffers daily from his stinginess. Yes, the Post is an expensive charity, but Bezos lost one-third as much money this year to the Costume Institute, which didn’t need a cent. Also, give me a break, the man is worth $277 billion. If he peeled off $3 billion to create a Post endowment and then walked away, that would throw off more than enough each year to run the Post properly for the rest of his life. When he died, Bezos could leave it more. He could still live like a pasha until then.
