Costume

Few things make me feel older than watching a VMAs red carpet. That’s less because the carpet is full of young people than because I have minimal sense of what the young pop star world wants from this spotlight. “Attention” is an honest but flippant answer; every red carpet exists for attention, and dinging everybody for it doesn’t get us anywhere. Given the sheer number of women who showed up on the carpet with one leg aggressively propped outside the confines of her dress, there are trends at play here that escape my understanding. (And you can’t even say it’s to flaunt youth, because Angelina Jolie’s leg dress blew all of these out of the water. Goddammit, young people, what’s going on with you??) It’s especially hard when one contingent of the awards is actively trying to make cogent social points about systemic inequality and the other half is trying to make fun of it, but that is the reason not to watch awards shows except for Nicki Minaj Vines. There’s a lot going on,… Read more »

The Met Gala was last night – the place where fashionistas and stars gather to decide who among this group of staggeringly rich adults is capable of dressing to theme. Of course, it’s one thing to dress to theme when that theme is, say, punk, or Charles James. But this year’s exhibit is titled “China: Through the Looking Glass,” and is – depending on who’s talking – a history of Chinese fashion and its influence on design in the West, or an exploration of the effects of the Western gaze on perceptions of China and Chinese fashion. It’s a crucial difference, one that I look forward to determining when I see the exhibit for myself – as much as a white person can determine what is and isn’t sufficient self-awareness when it comes to potential appropriation. Spoiler: Not much. (Something to keep in mind throughout this rundown, actually; I’m providing outsider commentary on an issue that involves outsiders helping themselves, so that’s as much a part of this mess as anything else. What fun the… Read more »

(Only two people in this picture really matter. Can you spot them?) I’ve talked before about the pageant qualities of the red carpet: how every look is the product of so many people the person in the dress is just the end user of some very complicated code, and what that code means. (Actual pageants helped inspire PERSONA; its sequel features a red carpet, for reasons.) But there’s something inescapably young-adult dystopian about the MTV red carpets, where most of the attendees are too young to rent a car but are handling a personal brand and quite often some network or label expectations. And they are all so very young; actors playing high school characters trying to look older than they are, the older actors trying as much as possible to look like high school. It’s an entire runway of forced-casual cognitive dissonance. At the same time, while the MTV Movie Awards remain laughable, at least they’re transparently so. A system based largely on Best Fight, Best Kiss, Best WTF Moment, Best Musical Moment, feels… Read more »

Ah, the Oscars! The most complicated Hollywood event of the year, employing phalanxes of stylists and makeup artists and managers and PR agents and event handlers and press, where a rainstorm means scrambling to keep water off the guests, stylists flying into their kits for waterproof mascara just in case, a cadre of umbrella-holders, and forty-five PR assistants with 150 BPM heart rates and staticky radios all praying they aren’t stationed by the tent seam that’s going to dump water on Julianne Moore. The job of the actress on the Oscars red carpet is to wear her outfit as hard as she possibly can, no matter who’s holding the camera, and Rosamund Pike is a trouper. Note how many people are behind her on that carpet,and none of them are even her people. (You know someone’s people because of the intense eye contact broken only as they scan the crowd for anyone they hate.) The awards themselves were predictable; the evening often awkward. (I wrote about some of the inevitable self-mythologizing in Philadelphia Weekly.) But… Read more »