The ballgown is dead. Long live the simple white shirt. The look that will go down in history from this year’s Oscar ceremony is a crisp white shirt. And not only because both Will Smith and Chris Rock were wearing them during that incident, but because the best dressed on the red carpet passed on the fairytale frocks and chose white shirts instead.
Zendaya, star of the six-statuette winning Dune, wore an ivory silk shirt with a deep collar and pearl-buttoned cuffs, cropped mid-ribcage above a sequined silver maxi skirt. The look was custom-made by Valentino Haute Couture for Zendaya, whose longtime stylist Law Roach has become one of Hollywood fashion’s most formidable power players, and who also dressed Venus Williams for the ceremony.
Uma Thurman wore a more conventionally proportioned white shirt by Bottega Veneta, teamed with a floor length black satin skirt in a look which referenced the white shirt she wore in her own breakthrough role almost three decades ago as Mia Wallace in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
Kristen Stewart wore a sheer white shirt by Chanel – the crystal buttons unbuttoned beneath a fitted mini-tuxedo – with black hotpants. A gown wasn’t even on Stewart’s shortlist, with the last-minute decision coming down to a choice between pairing the shirt and jacket with shorts or with trousers. (“Kristen was like, ‘Let’s do it. Let’s go for shorts’,” Stewart’s stylist Tara Swennen told Harper’s Bazaar.) Stewart’s fiancee, the actor and screenwriter Dylan Meyer, also wore a white shirt on the red carpet, pintucked and untucked.
Wanda Sykes, one of the night’s co-hosts, wore a white shirt with rhinestone buttons under a Pamela Roland shawl-collared white tuxedo suit to walk the red carpet with her wife Alex Sykes, who wore a more Oscar-traditional sparkly dress. Lady Gaga, whose award ceremony fashion game has been the stuff of legend ever since she wore a dress made of meat to the 2010 MTV awards, chose a wing tip white shirt with a bow tie and tuxedo to close the ceremony, presenting the best picture award alongside Liza Minnelli.
There were some spectacular outfits on the red carpet – Maggie Gyllenhaal in a surreal Schiaparelli gown dotted with gold rosettes which from some angles appeared to grow elephant’s trunks or rabbit’s ears; Kirsten Dunst making the sustainable choice in vintage Christian Lacroix; Billie Eilish in a vast stormcloud of gothic Gucci; Chloe Bailey in a purple beaded gown with a thigh split that reached to her armpit; and Kodi Smit-McPhee in an ice-blue Bottega Veneta tux – but perhaps the only star to steal the limelight from the white shirt wearers was Timothée Chalamet, who must have prompted a global frenzy of teenage fainting when he appeared on the red carpet wearing no shirt at all.
The white shirt is an eye-catching pick at the Oscars, where the normal rules of dressing are reversed. Arrive bedecked in sequins or feathers and no one bats an eyelid; wear a plain white shirt, and hear the gasps.
But more than that, a white shirt is an effective route for celebrities who want to be at the Oscars while simultaneously distancing themselves from those elements of the Academy Awards backstory which have become toxic. The traditional ballgown, steeped as it is in a patriarchal vision of femininity and redolent of high-society elitism, strikes a tone-deaf note as the Academy Awards continue to grapple with diversity of representation and of celebrating female creative talent.
A white shirt on a woman – and its absence on a man, in the case of Chalamet – speaks of a break with the hubris the Oscars are trying to leave behind, and of a more modern attitude to gender. Worth noting, perhaps, that Chalamet picked his suit from the most recent Louis Vuitton womenswear collection, where it was last seen on a catwalk in Paris starring in Louis Vuitton’s show at the Musee d’Orsay earlier this month.
The white shirt has been an onscreen classic since Lauren Bacall wore one opposite Humphrey Bogart in 1948’s Key Largo, and more recently has earned a red carpet style pedigree.
In 1998, Sharon Stone wore a white cotton shirt from The Gap with a lavender satin Vera Wang skirt, a combination which raised eyebrows at the time but which is now seen as one of her best red carpet moments. Diane Keaton, an iconic white-shirt wearer onscreen as Annie Hall, wore a white shirt with a Ralph Lauren frock coat and bowler hat for the 2004 Oscars, when she was nominated for her role in Something’s Gotta Give.
The hottest look on the red carpet is one that most people watching have hanging in their wardrobes already. Maybe the Oscars really have changed.
