The most increasingly-frustrating red carpet event of the year happened last night! Once again, it was time for the Met Costume Institute Gala, celebrating another exhibit that honors landmark designers and iconic moments in the history of fashion; once again, the celebrities ruined it all. There’s an inherent tension on the red carpet between fashion professionals and the increasing celebrity presence. Make no mistake, Anna Wintour and company are happy to make this event as popular as possible while still looking exclusive enough to be frightening to everybody who wants in. (I’m sure some fashion people miss when it was a smaller crowd and peasants weren’t stacked fifteen deep across the street to catch a look at the arrivals, but Anna Wintour is savvy enough to know the value of the amount of press coverage this show gets now. She’s savvy enough to show up every year in something that allllmost feels like something from the year before, except that obviously that couldn’t be the case because Anna Wintour would never be late to a… Read more »

If you are here, reading this, you know that the red carpet is a bizarre, self-sustaining piece of performance art. In case you’d like a reminder of that before we get started, here’s Taraji P. Henson casually greeting former costar Jackie Chan. Fun, right? Let’s all go have an extremely casual red-carpet time! This year was slightly unusual by Oscar standards. In particular, one spectacular thing happened in which the best movie on the slate actually won Best Picture!…after tripping over every single one of the public-embarrassment roadblocks that haunts my nightmares, of the sort that likely resulted in the firing of minimum two people (I’m thinking one PriceWaterhouseCooper and at least one of the in-house production people, to keep it equitable). So, congratulations to Moonlight, a film I adored that absolutely deserved its win. Also sorry to those people who are definitely fired by now. There were also some very interesting red-carpet moments that set this year a little apart from the standard stylist-off. Anousheh Ansari, the first Muslim woman in space, accepted Best… Read more »

If awards season is a series of teen-film house parties for film and TV types, the BAFTAs are the laid-back bonfire at the house of the girl who’s taking college classes already and went to boarding school for two years in a city she keeps changing the location of just to mess with the betting pool (your current bet is Vienna). She pretends to be above high-school drama but has still invited a big group of people to roast marshmallows in the artisan fire pit her parents put in last year, and you suspect she’s done it purely to feed them her parents’ good liquor until somebody’s drunk enough to spill the beans. As such, the red carpet is hard to figure. There’s always a good showing by British designers (McQueen and Jenny Packham both showed up this year), the occasional example of someone staying On Brand for Red Carpet Season, and a few people making the most of the fact that the BAFTAs are just invested enough to care, but not invested enough to… Read more »

It’s strange times. We know it, and everybody on the red carpet at the SAG Awards knows it; the ceremony was peppered with speeches about the fractured state of the union, as if everyone was both aware that it’s easy for things like this to look frivolous during political turbulence, and also as if everyone was so utterly gobsmacked by how little time it took to fracture that union that it was an impossible topic to avoid. Like Annalise Basso, we as a nation are hurling our gigantic chiffon scarves of outrage against the winds of tyranny, opening our arms against the tide of fascism like a drop-shoulder evening gown that actually lets you open your arms. Related: I’m going to do this rundown, and we’re going to get into the usual A Slightly More Bohemian Red Carpet Is Not An Excuse For That Dress commentary. However, we’re going to open with a section of politicized outfits alongside potential organizations to consider if you, like me, want to do your part but also just want… Read more »