What Is Nudity? What Is Volume? And More Urgent Questions from Cannes
The phrase “recession indicator” has been overused to the point of near-meaningless, and yet, it’s the only phrase I can use to describe the scene at Cannes this year. The day before the festival began, the powers that be randomly decided to ban nudity and voluminous dresses from the red carpet. Was this an austerity measure (less fabric) (but also, more fabric, due to the lack of nudity)? Were they bowing to encroaching global conservatism? It’s hard to say for sure, but many women, including jury member Halle Berry, scrambled to find new outfits last-minute, and at least one wept openly in my presence.
On the party front, Vanity Fair skipped their bash for the second year in a row, Airmail did not throw an identical rival party just to piss off Vanity Fair like they did a few years back, and I was not once invited to the Hotel du Cap to listen to oil barons discuss fake self-produced movies about male redemption. I was, however, invited to see Kevin Spacey receive a completely made-up award from a suspicious charity, which, again, felt like a singular harbinger of doom.
It’s important to have a self-appointed mission while at Cannes in order to keep yourself from getting sucked into its darker vortex, where people will quite literally mow you down in the street to get a glimpse of Tom Cruise. It’s easy to forget your normal life and find yourself panicking in the street as a soldier with a machine gun berates you for walking the wrong way out of the Palais. This year, due to the aforementioned extra-fascist energy, it felt even more necessary. So I decided to try to determine what, exactly, constituted a “nude” dress and what constituted “volume” in the eyes of the French, knowing in my heart that these were impossible questions that I would never get a reasonable answer to.
All week I roamed around the Palais, interviewing various women about their voluminous and nude dresses to see if the festival had given them any trouble on the red carpet. The latter point was more difficult to address, because nudity is far more subjective than volume, even though, as it turns out, the festival thinks volume is also subjective. Volume is (normally) science. Nudity is poetry. I did hear that women in “nude” dresses were being turned away, but I mostly approached women whose dresses were gigantic, either horizontally or vertically.
At the opening night gala, Heidi Klum showed up with a very long train, but minutes later, a man ran past me in the halls of the Palais with her dress in his arms like a corpse. I stopped him: “Is that Heidi’s dress?” “Yes!” he said. “Did she have to take it off?” I yelled as he kept running. “No!” He yelled back. “She changed!” This is what I mean regarding the impossibility of concrete answers at Cannes.
Farhana Bodi, who has millions of Instagram followers, wore a pink gown that had a long train that, at a certain juncture, began weaving around her head like a crown. She informed me that she had to cut the dress at the last minute, shortening her train. “It was much longer, but because of the new rule, I didn’t want to get rid of my cape. But I still wanted to bring the drama to the carpet.” Nora Emilie Nakken, who is Miss Universe Norway, wore a long yellow train. “I saw on the internet that they have a new rule,” she said. “And my dress from Paris didn’t show up on time. So I had to wear this train. It’s huge.” There was a gleam in her eye. “But they didn’t say anything,” she added. One woman wore a gigantic blue dress that matched a dress worn by her dog, who was also present. This was allowed, somehow. Another wore a dress that featured two gigantic golden horses perched on each shoulder, and I wondered if she were making a statement — if she could not have volume at the bottom of her body, she would have it on the top, and there was nothing the festival could do about it.
At the Eddington premiere, I met a woman named Nell. “I am Disaster Girl,” she said, by way of introduction. I soon learned this was the title of the movie she was shooting, which she had also emblazoned across the back of her dress. The festival had made her remove it. “I am a little bit sad,” she said, visibly tearing up. “They said the letters must be off. It was ‘too provocative.’ I said, ‘Please, please! I won’t do anything crazy.’ Just enjoy the Disaster Girl moment. Disaster Girl stands for power and to be brave and to do things. But it’s okay.”
At the Die My Love premiere, Robert Pattinson kept tripping on Jennifer Lawrence’s train, but Jennifer was not dragged off the carpet. I began to realize that the answer to my question was the same answer to every question at Cannes: these rules were only being applied to non-famous people. At the Highest 2 Lowest premiere, trains abounded. I accidentally stepped on the woman in front of me at least four times and I began to wonder very secretly if the festival was right about this one thing. At Splitsville, Jason Momoa carried the train for his girlfriend Adria Arjona. I tried to take a photo and a festival employee blocked my camera; you’ll simply have to put your trust in me here.
In my minimal time off from my detective work, I attended a few parties. Kering’s Women in Motion party, which supports burgeoning female directors, celebrated its 10th anniversary by getting Nicole Kidman to show up. She hosted both a separate chat about her work and later spoke at the dinner about the importance of working with women, especially new talent, and briefly addressed her propensity for wigs and how she wakes up at 3 a.m. to write down her dreams. Thierry Fremaux introduced her by proclaiming that “Australians know how to party,” and began telling a story about Nicole on a party bus before she joked, “Enough!”
Before she spoke, I wandered around the party, looking at everyone. There was Patrick Schwarzenegger in deep conversation with his White Lotus threesome partner, Charlotte Le Bon, who was wearing an adorable pair of glasses. Salma Hayek smoked prolifically in conversation with Julia Garner and Jeremy Strong. Charli XCX arrived and took photos next to a seemingly unawares Guillermo del Toro, who sat mostly alone and chatted amiably to anyone who approached him. There was a Paul Mescal/Daisy Edgar Jones reunion, and I watched Rosie Huntington-Whiteley grab a candle off the bar and use it to light Charli’s cigarette.
At an event for Highest 2 Lowest, I ended up sitting at a table for 20 minutes with Spike Lee as he cheerfully went through his Instagram with me, and I got important closure from him regarding our last interaction, which occurred ten years ago outside of a Beyoncé concert. At THR’s Die My Love party, Pedro Pascal sleevelessly had conversation with Joaquin Phoenix and Lakeith Stanfield walked around powerfully in a baseball hat, holding his wife’s hand. Jennifer Lawrence, who had changed into a different dress with a different level of volume, hung out mostly in the VIP area; Sissy Spacek closed down the party. At a small event for Eleanor the Great, I sat with June Squibb as she ate sliders and we watched a man roam around the party playing a flute very energetically.
Walking home at an unholy hour, I ran into Alana Haim, who was standing on the sidewalk in a large group, eating an ice cream and yelling joyfully about something in an outfit that was free of extraneous diameter. A few days later, at her premiere for Kelly Reichardt’s Mastermind, she wore a voluminous dress, albeit one with no train. But trains proliferated in her wake. Elle Fanning dragged a dress up the red carpet, as did Gillian Anderson and Coco Rocha, who appeared to struggle mightily but bravely with the volume of her dress. I decided, watching her, that it should be the legal right of women to wear fashion that hobbles themselves and others. I then approached a beautiful young woman in the Palais whose train stretched at least four feet behind her to ask her if the festival had given her any trouble, à la Disaster Girl. She looked panicked, like she’d been caught doing some federal crime. “I can’t talk,” she said. “I’m here for work.”