It’s the year 2000 and a girl in red pleather snakeskin pants and a sequin boob tube slinks away from the DJ booth and up the stairs to the rooftop for some air.
Or rather, it’s me and I’m 17 at Roxy’s Rhythm Bar in Melville, and like the couple of hundred other teenagers who’ve swamped the club, I’m leaving the dancefloor, bedraggled and soggy and covered in foam, edging myself away from the fray for an awkward chat with a St John’s boy and a sip of Redd’s cider.
The idea for these foam-filled parties might have originated in the banging super clubs of Ibiza, but this was anything but.
No-one’s teenage years are pleasant, but given that ours involved Coyote Ugly, the Bump CDs and a proliferation of foam parties, the youth of the late 90s and early 2000s should get extra leeway from Discovery for mental health treatment.
Understandably, I’d largely cancelled this memory of tragic dance floors pumped full of clammy, strange bubble stuff that obscured whatever was happening below revellers’ knees. Until this week, when the world’s most tone-deaf, weird and, honestly, unlikeable engaged couple – Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez – brought the memories flooding back.
In advance of their wedding in Venice on June 28, the 61-year-old and 55-year-old had a foam party on the billionaire’s super super yacht. The paparazzi pics of the muscle man Bezos (do you remember what he used to look like?) and, erm, physically enhanced Sánchez, in their swimming togs, playing in waist-high froth on the deck of the $500m boat, really sent a clear message. I’d sum it up as: we’re obscenely rich, pretty tragic, and give zero fucks about the rest of you.
My sibling (also a victim of the 90s), who alerted me to the photos, said: “I can imagine the foam machine suppliers had to dust them off and get them from the back of the warehouse! They haven’t used them in 20 years.”
Inflatable crocs
It made me think – there is just nothing likeable about the duo. We want to make fun of them. The news has been flooded with articles about them this week as their outrageous nuptials approach. The Telegraph broke down what it takes to look like Sánchez: £24,000 on cosmetic work, £26,000 on teeth, £1,050 on “tweakments” – and that’s just the surface-level stuff.
The Guardian reported how they’ve been forced to move their wedding to a different part of the historic city after protests – including a threat of inflatable crocs – had them readjusting plans.
I find them vexing, but the people of Venice? They are not fans. As the BBC reported: “On Monday, activists from a group calling itself Everyone Hates Elon unfurled a giant image of Bezos in Piazza San Marco, protesting against the super-rich with the slogan: ‘If you can rent Venice for your wedding then you can pay more tax.’”
It’s obviously the brash, tone-deafness of their wealth and behaviour that has everyone’s backs up. But it’s also the try-hardness. The hunger to be seen as sexy and aspirational – on a yacht, with glossy abs, in skin-tight Versace. It’s the desperation of it all. A kind of billionaire cosplay of what they think cool looks like.
Bezos used to be a boring tech nerd in dad jeans. He built Amazon – a company that ate the world. Then he got divorced, hit the gym, bought the biggest boat he could find, and started dating a woman who seems to speak exclusively in exclamation marks. Together, they’ve curated this cartoon version of glamour – but no-one’s buying it.
There are lots of rich people. There are even rich people who are stylish or discreet or self-aware. Ol’ Jeff and Lauren are none of those things. They’re what happens when you mix infinite money with zero taste and exist in some kind of weird echo chamber. Can you imagine being in a social circle where their kind of “hot and fun” is the goal? Exhausting!
Bezos, who’s worth an estimated $220bn, is not just rich. He’s “the peasants are massing at the castle gates with pitch forks” rich. And this week – with the world gripped by war, heatwaves, floods and economic turmoil – the image of him and Sánchez frolicking in foam, like extras in a 2000s music video, feels especially grotesque.
They could’ve done anything. Instead, they gave us a giant yacht, a spray of spume, and a reminder that money can’t stop you being the cringe couple.
Top image: Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez. Picture: Arnold Jerocki/FilmMagic; Currency collage.
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