The Oscars red carpet may seem like the zenith of Hollywood fantasy, but in truth it’s a forum for braggadocio and dealmaking: who can flex their fashion credibility by wearing something that appeals to the fashion elite, and whose star is bright enough to earn a major paycheck, which can be upward of $200,000, for wearing a designer dress.
For fashion brands, it’s a night to show off that they can pick a winner — a gown worn by someone who takes home a best actress statuette is immediately codified in the fashion history canon — and their ability to script the contemporary rules of glamour by dressing either the most guests or the most important ones.
And increasingly, it’s a night for stars to use the red carpet to perform their role as concerned citizens, empathetic and sensitive despite their elite perch, speaking about war or sexual assault or inequality or, at Sunday’s ceremony, the call for a cease-fire in Gaza. Fashion brands, which are almost always fearful that they are irrelevant even if many of them are billion-dollar businesses, love this kind of moment — they can make a dress or suit that is stately enough for the celebrity soapbox.
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On Sunday evening, the dominating fashion message was sobriety and politics. Stylists have long discouraged their clients from wearing black — it doesn’t pop in photographs, and details tend to wash away — but this year, those rules went out the window for almost all of the major nominees and most-watched attendees. Lily Gladstone, who was favored to win best actress for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” delivered on the night’s theme with the most elegance, wearing a strapless midnight blue velvet gown with an embroidered cape by Gucci, which is in the midst of a tepidly received revitalization by designer Sabato de Sarno (so: major coup for Gucci). The gown was made in collaboration with an Indigenous designer and jeweler, Joe Big Mountain, paying tribute to Gladstone’s heritage and her film.
Others foregrounded politics more urgently, wearing a pin showing their support for Artists4Ceasefire, an organization that wrote a letter imploring President Biden for a permanent halt to the war in Gaza. More than 380 actors, directors and other entertainers have signed the letter, and guests including Ramy Youssef and Billie Eilish wore the pin on their lapels.
Tasteful, even downright classic, is now the leading quality in Hollywood image-making after several years of wow-y, out there and even stunt fashion. Now is the time for long gloves, strapless dresses and muted tones. Sandra Hüller, nominated for “Anatomy of a Fall,” wore one of the most conservative Schiaparelli dresses — a house known for its meme-able, surrealist style — imaginable. Carey Mulligan, nominated as best actress for her role in “Maestro,” wore a strapless black Balenciaga gown with a spray of white in its trumpet hem, inspired by the 1950s work of Cristobal Balenciaga. Emma Stone, who won best actress for “Poor Things,” wore a strapless pale green dress by Louis Vuitton with a freaky train and a peplum at the waist. The dress was divisive — it popped open in the back, which Stone breathlessly joked about while accepting her award — but a staid show of deference to her character’s extravagant sleeves.
Those who weren’t nominated but just looked great underscored how sweeping this subdued agenda became: Greta Lee in a white-and-black Loewe dress that debuted in designer Jonathan Anderson’s Paris show just this month. Michelle Yeoh in a sinewy-but-armorial silver Balenciaga dress. Jennifer Lawrence wore slightly ’80s-in-a-good way Dior polka dots (though she changed into a vintage couture Givenchy dress from the 1990s for the Vanity Fair party later that night, assumingly to allow her to fulfill her contractual obligations to Dior and continue her makeover as a fashion-forward goddess, with stylist Jamie Mizrahi). Jodie Foster wore a somber but sophisticated navy Loewe dress with a lovely wrap detail around the neck. Gabrielle Union wore a hard-but-chic Carolina Herrera strapless dress.
If self-styled “image architect” Law Roach helped usher in an era of the fashion flex — straight off the runway dresses, forgotten vintage gems plucked from decades past — we are now in the age of fashion politesse. Even Zendaya wore Armani, the brand that helped build the red carpet into a machine for tasteful beige in the 1990s. “Barbie” stars Margot Robbie and America Ferrera both wore Versace chain-mail dresses — a classic design by the Italian house, which combines designer Donatella Versace’s need for armor with her desire to look absolutely sexy. Facing an evening from which many fans believe director Greta Gerwig and her record-setting film were shut out, it was a low-key statement of sartorial strength.
Still, a few guests looked as if they were genuinely having fun with their clothes: Andrea Riseborough in a plaid Loewe dress (although the little bag, presumably encouraged by Loewe to push the more affordable end of their products, was a distracting miss).
Sean Wang’s grandmothers, the stars of his documentary short “Nai Nai & Wai Po (Grandma & Grandma),” arrived dressed in outrageously colorful Rodarte. Ryan Gosling wore a pleasantly floppy black suit piped with rhinestones. Eilish and Da’Vine Joy Randolph were probably the best of the fashion-forward pack. Eilish in a Chanel ensemble with little white socks, like a Pop Star Barbie showing up to swan around, and Randolph in a pale blue sequin gown by Louis Vuitton. When Randolph clutched her trophy in that fantastic dress, she looked evocatively Old Hollywood, sexy and most of all, like a winner.
But why all this black? The sea of black dresses recalled the recent Valentino collection in Paris, designed by Pierpaolo Piccioli in all black as a reflection of the sorry state of global affairs, and the recurring gesture by Democratic lawmakers of wearing all-white to the State of the Union as a statement about women’s rights.
But this was unplanned, and of course, an unplanned “trend,” as it were, always tells us more about the state of the world — how the people who create and reinforce what we see as aspirational, emulatable and desirable today. The message is nothing complicated, which makes it all the more frightening: We are living in dark times.