“Every request we’ve received thus far has been for black,” a representative of an LA fashion showroom told the Hollywood Reporter. There have also been reports from Paris of brightly coloured gowns, laboured over for weeks, being mothballed in favour of last-minute black alternatives.
The New York-based designer Naeem Khan had designed a gold dress for the presenter Christina Hendricks to wear at the ceremony on Sunday; it is now being remade in black. “This was a big challenge in my world because everything I do is made by hand,” Khan told Womenswear Daily.
“When you have 20 people working on a dress and you only have a week and a half to make these things between India and the US, it is always very difficult ... but I know it will be worth it. [The gown] has been redesigned in a way that is specific to her personality and the empowered message we’re sending for the evening.”
The nominees Saoirse Ronan, Allison Janney, Mary J Blige, Holly Hunter and Gal Gadot are among those who have pledged to wear black. The cast of Big Little Lies, the hot-favourite female-led show whose star Reece Witherspoon is one of the 300 signatories to Time’s Up, are expected to follow suit.
But the mooted “blackout” has prompted criticism among those who view it as a dumbing down of the debate. To the actor Rose McGowan, it is little more than a feeble whitewash: “Your silence is the problem,” she said in tweet directed at Meryl Streep and other actors last month who she decried for failing to speak out earlier and louder.
Elsewhere, commentators feel a dress code that makes women less visible sends the wrong message. According to Robin Givhan, a fashion critic for the Washington Post, “taking the fizz out of fashion is ... regressive. It smacks of sexism to say, even indirectly, that fashion – the quintessential realm of women – must be shunned in order for women to be taken seriously ... mostly it reads like the proper response to sexual harassment is to change one’s attire.”
In People magazine, a Hollywood source has reported dissent among attendees: “Some feel women should celebrate their newfound power, strong voices and future by wearing a wide variety of bright shades.”
For every commenter who believes the black dress code can be part of the solution to Hollywood’s deep-seated problems, there is another who is adamant that any red carpet at all is part of the problem; its beauty pageant associations do not make it an easy fit with feminism.
