Red Carpet Rundown

The SAGs: The one where everyone tries the style stuff they aren’t sure will work for the Oscars, the Emmys, or the Globes! That’s not entirely fair; obviously, at this point in our late capitalist celebrityscape, every red carpet counts. And in some ways, the SAGs are a playground for actors in ensembles, where other red carpet camera appearances aren’t quite as guaranteed and they get to go all out for this one. We’ll see some of this later, from actors who are silently auditioning for other parts and/or trying to catch the eye of overwhelmed photographers! (Also, the usual disclaimer that if you think all this means I am claiming any immunity to red carpet optics because I’m somehow above all this, I wrote two books that weaponize the Miss Universe national costume contest. I am deep under this.) But it’s also a good red carpet for trying something you’re not entirely sure about, because if it’s great then it’ll go viral anyway, and if it’s a little weird, at least you didn’t do… Read more »

Welcome to this year’s Met Red Carpet Gala, which lived up to its “Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” premise by being so direct yet so broad a theme that it essentially required a level of participation where you were either wearing Catholicism cosplay or probably off the brief! You got us again, Catholicism, you sneaky thing.   (Red carpet; “Madonna and Child with Saints,”Giovanni di Paolo, 1454) And boy, there were a lot of feelings about Catholicism happening on this carpet and in the internet-mosphere. One thing I saw that I’d like to discount fairly wholesale before we get started is that an exhibit like this is disrespectful to Catholicism. On the surface, this seems like a fair enough flag, along the lines of the flags raised about the China exhibit in 2015. However, the China exhibit was largely curated by outsiders, using clothes designed by outsiders, and so any concerns about misunderstandings and slights in the exhibit itself were likely well-founded. (I found parts of the exhibit very interesting, but the curatorial captioning was often… Read more »