(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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.)
[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 […]