Male movie stars are dumping the tux to create fabulous
fashion ‘moments’ in gender-blurring outfits that break the rules of red-carpet dressing. What will we see at next Sunday’s Oscars?
At the end of last year Glamour published a listicle of the “41 Most Memorable Red Carpet Looks” from the past decade. The list featured the usual suspects (Lady Gaga’s hiding-in-a-gone-off-hard-boiled-egg look at the Grammys;
Angelina Jolie and the Leg That Went Viral), but only three men (Timothée Chalamet, Billy Porter and Ezra Miller). It was a strikingly low number, but maybe not surprising. For decades, menswear’s slow adaptiveness on the red carpet has felt positively glacial next to women’s. The dress code for celebrity men had long become an exact science. Specifically: everyone dress exactly the same, like they do in the Village of the Damned and at the checkout in M&S.
Obviously, there have been significant exceptions to the black-tie rule, like Robert Downey Jr experimenting with an Ascot tie and a cummerbund or Kiefer Sutherland presciently approximating a noughties hipster in the 80s, or the cast of Interview with the Vampire (Cruise, Pitt, Banderas, Slater) in 1994 looking like the awkward AGM of Hairdressers of Hollywood.