Lauren Sánchez Bezos put $34M to change what clothes are made of—and ignited an Amazon debate

In late April, the Bezos Earth Fund, where Sánchez Bezos serves as vice chair, announced $34 million in grants to advance breakthrough materials for the fashion and textile industry. The money is split across four research tracks. 

Columbia University and the Fashion Institute of Technology will share $11.5 million to grow a textile fiber from bacteria fed on agricultural waste. UC Berkeley gets $10 million for a biodegradable fiber inspired by spider silk—no silkworms, spiders, or plastic. Clemson University receives $11 million to gene-edit cotton with built-in color and performance. And the Cotton Foundation gets $1.5 million to restore a non-GMO cotton seedbank. Sánchez Bezos has become the more visible figure in the couple’s philanthropy, setting the pace at a fund racing to disburse the remaining roughly $7 billion of Bezos’s $10 billion climate pledge before 2030. 

“These teams are growing fiber from bacteria, engineering cotton that comes out of the ground in color and creating silk-like fibers from compost,” Sánchez Bezos said in a statement. “That’s not just good for the planet. That’s the future of fashion.”

The fund says materials and manufacturing account for roughly 80% of fashion’s environmental footprint, including emissions, water use, pollution, and landfill waste. So the Bezos Earth Fund’s logic is that if the fiber gets fixed, then one of the major problems with fashion waste would be cut before a garment is ever made. 

Reaction and debate

While it’s a decent investment in the sustainability of fashion, not everyone is buying the sincerity of Sánchez Bezos’ move. The announcement landed just days ahead of the 2026 Met Gala, where Bezos and Sánchez Bezos served as lead sponsors and honorary co-chairs. Their role at the gala—revered as one of the most significant events in fashion each year—sparked significant backlash, with activists protesting over allegations of worker exploitation at Amazon. 

The Met Gala is more than a party: It’s fashion’s yearly marquee fundraiser that bankrolls the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and is a major cultural event. The criticism came because the grant that was meant to remake fashion’s supply chain was announced the same week the couple headlined fashion’s biggest night. So to some, it looked like image management.

The activist group Everyone Hates Elon plastered anti-Bezos posters around New York, and critics argued Bezos was using the event to “launder his image,” one protester told the Daily Mail. Fashion trade publication Sourcing Journal also reported the criticism spurred a worker-led counter-event, and that posters cast it as the “Bezos Met Gala” “brought to you by worker exploitation.” One organizer’s line summed up the mood: billionaires must remember there would be no billionaires without essential workers.

The debate was sparked again just a few days ago when Sánchez Bezos posted a video on Instagram about what sustainable materials clothes can be made out of. She named mushrooms, pineapple leaves, cactus, bacteria, and fishing nets as viable clothing materials, adding she is “so excited to be working with the Bezos Earth Fund and the scientists reinventing the next generation of planet-friendly fabrics.”

While many comments on the video were supportive and fascinated, others were skeptical. 

“Can offset carbon emissions of private jet travel,” one Instagram user said. “Highly doubt your Dolce wedding dress and 80 corsets are made from cactus or bacteria,” said another.

Critics are also unsure of the Bezos’ investment in sustainable fashion because Amazon is the world’s largest clothing retailer and has long been criticized for pollution tied to manufacturing, packaging, and rapid delivery. To be sure, Amazon says it is working toward net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, but its 2024 sustainability report showed absolute carbon emissions rose 6% that year, even as emissions per shipped unit fell about a third since 2019.

The other issue is many of these next-generation materials are expensive to manufacture, and sustainable-textile startups have long struggled to compete with polyester on price and scale. But the Bezos Earth Fund appears to understand that. The fund says its aim is to “drive performance up and premiums down.” So while these developments are possible, they are costly.

The Bezos Earth Fund didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.