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Red Carpet Rundown

Red Carpet Rundown: MTA Movie Awards 2015

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(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 »

Red Carpet Rundown: Oscars 2015

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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 »

Red Carpet Rundown: 2015 SAG Awards

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Red carpet season is in full swing! Last night we had the SAG Awards, otherwise known as the Costume B-Roll, where the only goal is to look half-decent, burn off whatever lingering obligations you have to a designer your client has promised to wear, and quietly begin marketing yourself for a very different role a year from now. As such, almost no one looked bad, because no one was taking any risks – this was a look nice & show up affair for neatly everyone. In that case, we’ll only have a few divisions, but sometimes people’s dress choices are interesting almost despite them! (“People” = a team of trained professionals who have long meetings including inspiration boards and projected income charts. “Them” = the actors they are dressing.) Look of the Night: Absolutely literally, the look of the night belongs to Frances McDormand. But I also enjoy her outfit. (Not as much as her face, but how could you?) I hope she dressed herself. I hope she dressed everyone behind her. I hope she… Read more »

Miss Universe 2014

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Last night the Miss Universe pageant, which is technically Miss Universe 2014 but dithered until it became simply the 63rd Annual, began with the National Costume Contest. About six weeks from now, my latest novel, PERSONA, hits shelves. Persona is a political thriller (diplomats, assassinations, the usual), but of course one of the most fascinating aspects of statecraft is the ways it asks you to set aside your identity for something else’s sake; often you don’t get to decide, and maybe you don’t even realize until later what exactly is gone. Tomorrow I’ll show you the promo cards for Persona and talk a bit about the swimsuit competition of this contest. But for tonight, the celebrity aspect that gets folded into Persona’s slightly sidelong world is partially influenced by behind-the-scenes glimpses of pageants like this one. Miss Universe doesn’t get as much traction in the States as you might think, but it’s gaining, and it’s already a major event elsewhere, with all the weight that goes with it. (The Guardian talks today about a selfie… Read more »

Red Carpet Rundown: Golden Globes 2015

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The red carpet is always an alien planet. The gravity field is different there, objects held in orbit by twenty-thousand dollar dresses, jewelry that comes with its own bodyguards, and clutch purses studded with adamantium – or no purse, if designer contracts couldn’t be arranged: it’s dangerous to your image to go with a purse you bought yourself unless you’re under 14. Your goal is to stand out, unless you risk being put on a worst-dressed list if you do, in which case you play it safe. (Or, sometimes, you wear a fashion-forward thing you know will get you on the Worst Dressed because you’re demonstrating edge. It’s the Victorian language of clothing writ small; you wear hothouse flowers in the city because they’re more expensive, and take the priciest silk flowers you can buy into the country with you.) Let’s not pretend I don’t care about stunning outfits worn by famous people (I’m in this as much as anybody), but the red carpet goes beyond a fashion event to become coded messages about the… Read more »

Red Carpet Rundown: The 2014 Emmys

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[Before we get to current fashion, I have an article at The Toast about Victorian rational dress and cycling, “I don’t think I’ll venture on dual garmenture”.] Ah, the Emmys. The Emmys can mean a lot of things. An evening to honor the year’s most awardable TV shows based on a complicated rubric in which actual quality is often way down the list; a way for designers and stylists to begin the complicated mating dance that will eventually culminate in the Oscars – or, for a lucky few, the Met Costume Institute Gala. For us at home, it’s a chance to celebrate the increasingly murky TV/movie divide, and get early hints about what the Stylists’ Guild has in mind for us in the coming red carpet season, just like whatever the first vegetables are that bloom in a season of however long growing stuff takes, I know shockingly little about vegetables. It was, by and large, a lovely and tasteful year on the red carpet for the Emmys, an awards ceremony in which almost everyone… Read more »
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