The Cannes film festival is more covered and just in time for the opening ceremony in honor of Octogenarian Robert de Niro. Bella Hadid, Pas Blond, is already in the city, and the stars are expected, his Halle Berry, Scarlett Johansson and Emma Stone. But anyone who expects one of the most reliable movements on the red carpet can be disappointed. The new dress code For Gala screening, the admonition includes: “For decent reasons, nudity is forbidden on the red carpet, as well as in any other part of the festival.”
Aimed at a crisis in the industrial complex of the fashion film.
Nowhere has the naked dress been more a presence than in Cannes, where the combination of Mediterranean, sun and a certain Gallic contempt for prudence (or at least observed contempt for prudishness) has merged to create his own tradition of Sartorial liberation.
And ‘nudity’, when it comes to famous dressing, is a relative term. The idea that it might no longer be a shortcut to the spotlight is even more shocking than the clothing it can forbid.
“Naked dressing,” or that way of clothing in which large parts of the normal private body are broadcast for the public, a tent pole of the publicity machine has long before Marilyn Monroe Coud “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” in a microphone in a meat-colored sheath, it left little to the imagination.
In recent years it has practically become a category in itself, especially with events such as Gala. That is where Beyoncé played Venus in the Half Shell in 2015 in Sheer Givenchy with strategically placed floral embroidery. Whereas in 2024 Rita Ora wore a nude Marni Bodysuit covered with some looked on strings, and Kylie Minogue modeled a diesel dress with a naked torso superposed on her actual torso. It is framed like a PO bus libidinal party and a post-#metoo advertisement of the body. Anyway, it is almost always a talk point.
Completely back in 1985, Ilona -stallerOr La Cicciolina, the porn star, politician and former wife of Jeff Koons, walked the red carpet of Cannes in a white satin … Well, what would you call it? An evening version of Rudi Gernreich’s Monokini, with chest tires and a long white satin skirt. Madonna dropped her opera cape to reveal her Jean Paul Gaultier Bullet Bra and Undies on the carpet in 1991, and in 2002 Cameron Diaz wore a pure bead dress and panties, a pekaboo trend that is still strong.
Indeed, the dress as a scrim, a transparent piece nothing of nothing draped about bare skin or lingerie to suggest clothing without really covering a lot of everything, is perhaps the most popular current form of nude dressing. It is more omnipresent than, say, the skirt that is cut here and the top is cut there that is also modeled on the red carpet by many. It offers the illusion of clothing and also teases what is underneath.
It is unclear of the formulation of Cannes’s clothing regulations if the new policy only applies to literal nudity or clothing that reveals body parts that can reasonably be called ‘indecent’. According to Agnès Leroy, the head of the press for the festival, the new rules were established to codify certain practices that have been in force for a long time. The goal, she said, “is not to regulate the clothing in itself, but to prohibit complete nudity – which means the absence of clothing – on the red carpet, in accordance with the institutional framework of the event and French law.” (Even if the French law allows toplity on some beaches, a reality that can contribute to the confusion surrounding the rules of Cannes.)
Yet that leaves the dictum somewhat open to interpretation, given the general absence of dust in many evening looks. The vulgarity of one person can be the celebration of another person, and who wants to say who the police get whose body?
(This is reminiscent of the time that Melania Trump spoke critics of her naked photo shoots in her memoirs, who situates them in an artistic tradition that includes John Collier’s “Lady Godiva” and Michelango’s “David” and notes that “we have to honor our body and the timeless tradition of” timeless tradition)
Perhaps the new code is easily calculated to prevent the kind of striking stunt from preventing the Grammies in February, when you, the rapper who is previously known as Kanye West, crashes the red carpet with his wife, Bianca CensoriOnly to take off her hair fur coat to reveal her completely naked body “covered” by a completely transparent nylon slip that yielded no cover at all. That seemed to have brought the trend to its ultimate, disturbing extreme by breaking the last barrier in naked dressing: Genitalia.
Although you were not really invited to the event, he and his wife dominated the headlines more than the actual award ceremony the next day.
The fact that Cannes’s clothing instructions also forbids “extensive outfits, in particular those with a large train, which hinder the right flow of guests and complicate seats in the theater” suggests that what the organizers really had occurred the appearance of dresses that are their own kind of performance, which can be different from the film that the Nominale Nominale.
However, if that was the goal, it has failed somewhat. By officially forbidding nakedness on the carpet, the organizers of Cannes simply fueled a series of pieces (such as this) about nudity on the carpet. Most of them focus less on the actual significance of the term in all its thorny nuance than the possibility of visiting the notorious nude moments.
You could have seen it coming.
