Bezos-Backed Met Gala Was Marked By Protests

As celebrities wearing extravagant fashions trickled into Monday’s Met Gala, Elle Feneide balanced atop a police barricade across the street and held a sign for the high-profile guests and Jeff Bezos, one of the evening’s biggest backers. It said: “Your red carpet is stained with BLOOD.”

The 21-year-old protester, who towered above screaming onlookers as stars arrived at the event, told JS that the recent death of an Amazon warehouse worker (among other reported human rights abuses at the company) was part of the motivation behind her demonstration.

“I believe that if you shake hands with murderers, there’s blood on your hands, too,” said Feneide. “Everybody involved with the Met Gala this year has made a kind of endorsement of his actions and the systematic violence that he perpetrates.”

The controversy around labor practices at Amazon was among the hot topics on the New York City streets as Bezos and his wife, model Lauren Sánchez Bezos, chopped it up with the big-name invitees who were obscured by the walls of the Met, the tent around the red carpet and the layers of police and security surrounding the museum’s perimeter.

It was almost inevitable that the gala — the site of several protests in recent years — would face backlash this time around after the couple was announced as lead sponsors and later crowned honorary chairs for the Costume Institute’s premier fundraising fête. (Page Six reported the couple paid “at least $10 million.”)

The sharp reactions made sense to fashion journalist Amy Odell, who told JS about the baggage that comes with a spectacle that “invites the public to celebrate and gaze upon some of the most privileged people in the world.”

“It’s been tough, optically, for the gala as people have been thinking more about income inequality since the pandemic,” explained Odell, who is also the biographer of longtime gala chair Anna Wintour. “The gala is very opulent and lavish, so having the basis to pay for it doesn’t do anything to make that less pronounced.”

While Bezos defenders have noted that the gala serves as a critical fundraising tool for the museum (raising a record $31 million in 2025), there’s no doubt that presiding over the event offers an invaluable return on investment. In her Back Row newsletter last month, Odell described the Met as a “closed-door networking event” for fashion figures, donors and entertainers that’s morphed into a “big-box clout store” for deep pockets hoping to amplify their cultural cachet.

Veteran chair and Vogue magazine visionary Wintour brushed off questions around the backlash about the couple’s involvement in the gala, telling CNN that Sánchez Bezos is simply a “great lover of costume and obviously of fashion.”

In a subsequent CNN interview, Max Hollein — the Met’s director and CEO — described the gala as part of “the history of American philanthropy,” where those from across the political spectrum can support culture.

“Right now, maybe there’s an added layer of scrutiny, an added layer of attention to that,” he said. “But we will always be grateful for that support from various different sources.”

Along with Wintour, this year’s other co-chairs included Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman and Venus Williams — which made it a hard-to-miss event even for those who may object to Bezos, his support of Trump 2.0, Amazon spending tens of millions of dollars on union busting and his decision to hobble journalists’ work as the owner of The Washington Post.

When JS asked about the backlash, the Met did not respond.

Roughly two dozen protesters from Rise and Resist, a New York-based, self-described “nonviolent action group,” staged a “Resistance Red Carpet” where they donned sparkly, colorful (and sometimes cartoonishly “rich”) outfits just blocks from the Met’s steps. They unfurled a red carpet on the street to strut their stuff to messages against ICE and to sound the alarm on Bezos’ support for President Donald Trump, whom was described in one sign as a “pedophile, racist and traitor.”

At one point, the pop-up gala’s guests broke out into a carol that repeated the word “Epstein,” a nod to the late convicted sex offender whose old buddy, Trump, accepted a seven-figure, inauguration fund donation from the Bezos-founded company.

Wendy Brandes sported a Mother Nature-inspired fit and fake money-covered paper headwear that read “TAX THE RICH” and “WHITE MEN RUIN EVERYTHING.”

“The billionaires are destroying everything. That’s why they’re trying to get off the planet because they know how bad they are,” said the 58-year-old New Yorker, in a nod to the Bezos-backed Blue Origin Enterprises.

Calls to boycott the event escalated in April after U.K.-based protest group Everyone Hates Elon launched a scathing campaign aimed at Bezos. The group claimed responsibility for installing posters across New York City calling out the billionaire for avoiding taxes and suggesting the gala was turning a blind eye to his support for the president.

One version declared that “AMAZON POWERS ICE” while another said that the “Bezos Met Gala” is “brought to you by worker exploitation,” nods to Amazon’s reported contractual ties to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as its workers’ allegations of exploitative labor conditions.

Ahead of the grand affair, the group also left faux “pee bottles” with Bezos’ face around and outside the Met while covertly stocking the museum gift shop with commemorative plates labeling the billionaire-backed gala as “the world’s most expensive midlife crisis.”

“Right now feels like a very important time to spread a message about taxing the rich and ending the oligarchy around Donald Trump,” said one of the group’s founders, who requested not to be identified due to the fact that their demonstrations often involve unlawful vandalism. “I think it’s really important to point out that this lifestyle for [Bezos] is only made possible by him scrounging off the rest of us.”

On Sunday, the group — in an act backed by the Amazon Labor Union, founded in 2022 after a massive election victory in New York City — projected their calls to boycott the gala onto Bezos’ Manhattan penthouse, where the likes of Wintour, Venus and Serena Williams, as well as Kris and Kendall Jenner, partied it up the day before.

Video messages from Amazon employees, including one from Mary Hill, a 72-year-old worker at a warehouse in Raleigh, N.C., also flashed on the building’s facade.

On the morning of the gala, the Met’s union took to social media and shared pictures of the Amazon founder and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, to highlight workers’ desire for a “living wage,” noting in a social media post that 19% of its unit makes less annually than the cost of a ticket to last year’s gala.

Everyone Hates Elon’s founder is familiar with crashing Bezos’ parties before.

After starting the collective as a movement against tech mogul Elon Musk in 2025, the group set its sights on the Amazon tycoon last year, when it unfurled a massive banner in Venice, Italy, calling on him to pay more in taxes ahead of his estimated multimillion-dollar wedding in The Floating City.

One prominent New Yorker was notably absent from the gala: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic socialist who used his campaign to criticize the billionaire class. Mamdani recently told local outlet The Hell Gate that, instead of attending the gala as mayors before him have, he would skip the event to focus on “making the most expensive city in the United States affordable.”

Former New York City mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa (R) was spotted walking along the Central Park road behind the Met, telling JS he was “counting the number of cops” who were “protecting the billionaires” at the gala.

“Those people are totally indulgent, selfish —,” Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels and a Republican who lost to Zohran Mamdani in last year’s NYC mayoral election, said about the guests inside. “What are we doing for the homeless here? Why don’t they go into the subways?”

When asked whether he would have attended the gala had he won the election, Sliwa emphatically said he would have skipped the event, much like the mayor.

Odell stressed there’s a “real benefit” to getting invited to the gala, which Bezos has a long history with. The Amazon founder previously served as honorary chair when his company sponsored the gala in 2012, when tickets reportedly sat at $25,000 a pop. At the time, he had his sights on making a “significant” investment to bring high-end fashion to Amazon, which one analyst predicted would make the company a “huge threat to brands.”

In the years since, leaders at Blackstone, Meta and TikTok have held the honorary chair title after they or their respective companies backed the gala.

This year’s gala — with tickets now hitting $100,000 each (a figure that doesn’t include tables, which start around $350,000) — arrives as tech’s top dogs like anti-aging entrepreneur Bryan Johnson and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have found their footing on runways and at fashion shows.

To many, Bezos and his wife’s heavy involvement in the event was just additional evidence of tech billionaires trying to pry open the door to the fashion industry. Monday’s gala carved a space for Silicon Valley, making way for Zuckerberg and reserving tables for OpenAI, Meta, Snap, Shopify and Amazon, Vanity Fair noted.

”I think there’s a real interest in being seen in that context, I think they really view the fashion world as a way to seek female adoption,” Odell said of tech giants and their companies ingratiating themselves at the gala.

Wintour, who has served as gala chair all but one time since 1995, has built a friendship with the Amazon founder and his model wife in recent years.

On the day of Sánchez Bezos’ marriage to the Amazon founder, the model-turned-journalist-turned-socialite graced the digital cover story of Vogue, an editorial decision that led to backlash of its own.

The story was published just a day after Wintour announced she’d be stepping away from her role as editor-in-chief of the magazine after 37 years.

Odell, in a recent episode of the KCRW’s “The Sam Sanders Show,” likened the industry “coming around” to Sánchez Bezos to how Kim Kardashian was welcomed, pointing to the outcry over Kardashian’s Vogue cover with Kanye West ahead of their 2014 wedding.

“So we’re seeing the industry start to accept her more and sometimes, it’s the fashion industry that accepts these people and the public follows,” she said of Sánchez Bezos.

Odell told JS ahead of the gala that she’s certain protesters’ message would “hang heavy in the air” on Monday.

Feneide pointed to celebrities’ “largely performative” acts of protest while simultaneously prioritizing “profits over people.”

“Your actions speak louder than words; your choice to be here was a conscious choice instead of saying, ‘No, I’m not going to participate in your system of violence,’” she said.