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Hollywood may be a famously liberal town, but it is starting to look increasingly conservative. Or so it seemed at the Golden Globes, the first official red carpet and communal fashion pageant of the year — and thus theoretically the pacesetter for 2025, or at least the 2025 award season.
The biggest trend of the night wasn’t the usual stars dressing like statuettes, though there was a lot of that (hello, Mindy Kaling in Ashi Studio and Mikey Madison in Bottega Veneta) or stars dressing to match the carpet (see Dakota Fanning in Tony Ward and Emma Stone in Louis Vuitton). Rather the most notable trend was a retro classicism that made the event look like a cosplay convention for Olde Tinsel Town. Forget throwback Thursday; think send-me-back Sunday.
Ariana Grande set the tone by doing her best Audrey Hepburn impression in a buttery silk 1966 Givenchy couture column (the 1960s being the height of the Hepburn-Hubert fashion partnership).
Then there was Selena Gomez channeling Jackie Kennedy in ice blue Prada and a stylized bob; Nicole Kidman and Margaret Qualley with enormous Catherine Deneuve bouffant ponytails, the better to set off their Balenciaga and Chanel gowns; and Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro in newfangled Balmain and Dior versions of oldfangled 1950s ball gowns. Not to mention Pamela Anderson in a very Madame X Oscar de la Renta and matching black opera gloves, opera gloves being one of the most popular accessories of the night.
By the time Zendaya, normally one of the most adventurous dressers on any carpet, appeared in a strapless satin Louis Vuitton column gown with matching overskirt made in homage to the 1950s Black artist Joyce Bryant, it was clear that something … um, nostalgic was going on. And that’s not even counting the sea of traditional tuxes in the room.
Surely this has something to do with a well-documented Hollywood neurosis about looking silly that was born in the last century when Joan Rivers unleashed her inner Chihuahua on the denizens of the red carpet, the worst-dressed list emerged and the stylist became the new power broker in the fashion-film industrial complex.
Now, despite the numerous brand ambassadorships that link celebrities and fashion designers, most designers create at the will of those stylists, whose primary goal is to serve the comfort of their client. And what is more comfortable than eschewing one’s own taste to role-play like a Pinterest board collaged with style stars of the past? Zendaya’s gown would never have been recognizable as Vuitton if she wasn’t officially a face of the brand.
But part of the trend is probably also connected to the mood of the moment and the promise (and fears) of the incoming presidential administration, with its bombastic, celluloid reverence for the days of yore when America — and Hollywood — ruled the world and men wore ties and women wore pointy bras and (yes) gloves. Well, it’s happening politically. Why not sartorially? Besides, when you aren’t sure what’s coming, it’s safest to retreat to the surety of the past, especially when bathed in the soft-focus glow of the dream machine.
The problem is, while these women and men all looked plenty glamorous, with many of them making assorted best-dressed lists, they didn’t look modern. They didn’t even look as if they were having all that much fun with fashion. Nothing about these styles challenged established norms of dress, or created new ones.
Maybe the red carpet isn’t the place for that. Maybe that’s the job of the runway. But given the increasingly interdependent relationship between fashion and film (embodied this time around by Saint Laurent, which not only produced “Emilia Pérez,” but also dressed the stars Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón), that seems more and more like a false dichotomy. Part of the job of the red carpet is to translate the interesting parts of the runway for semi-real life.
Save for a few outlier experimentalists — Ayo Edebiri, who seemed delighted to find herself in a Loewe trouser suit with extra-long gold feather tie; Ali Wong in shredded red Balenciaga with her hair down and her signature dark-frame glasses; Jeremy Strong in a jade-green Loro Piana suit with matching bucket hat and glasses that made him look like a leprechaun tycoon — that didn’t happen.
Sure, those looks were weird. But they weren’t remotely retro and they were memorable in the ear-worm way that wiggles into the cerebral cortex, marinates for a while and then starts to influence fashion writ large. They had the courage of their own convictions.
If the Globes, at which the biggest awards of the evening went to the indie and the edgy — “Emilia Pérez” and “The Brutalist,” as well as the come-from-behind best actress and actor wins of Demi Moore for “The Substance” and Sebastian Stan for “A Different Man” — reflected anything, it was the power and value that comes from daring to be different and to pursue a singular vision.
Here’s hoping that, as the rest of the red carpets unfurl in the run-up to the Oscars, people start dressing to match.
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