Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos Are Married! See Inside Her Final Wedding Dress Fitting
June 27, 2025
“It’s been a wild ride, but it’s incredible,” Lauren Sánchez Bezos says, seen here in her Dolce & Gabbana lace wedding dress. Photographed outside Milan on June 9, 2025, by Tierney Gearon. Styled by Tabitha Simmons. Vogue, June 2025.
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.
The Bezos-Sánchez nuptials have stirred up a kind of mania. Major news 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 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 change you more than you think,’ and it completely has, visually, spiritually.”
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 party afterwards, a cocktail dress by Oscar de la Renta featuring 600 yards of hand-sewn chain and 175,000 crystals.
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 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.”
A month 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 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 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 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.”
“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 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!”
When Sánchez was a little girl in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she used to make veils with extra lace from her mother’s sewing supplies. “I always 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 personal.” During the fitting in 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 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 Sánchez, who caught a glimpse of the one-button, 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. “Hardly any glam, the least amount of make-up,” she insists. “This is part of the 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 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.”
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