At the Golden Globes back in November, Celine Song wore a suit. Except, the filmmaker behind Past Lives—the elegiac Greta Lee-starring romantic drama now contending for best picture at the Oscars—wasn’t just wearing a suit, even if the top half did follow the rules of a black blazer with a silky white button-down. The twist? A black Loewe skirt ruched at the waist then pierced horizontally with a silver clothing pin, as if the skirt was still in the atelier, and dispatched to the runway halfway through being made. As fashion statements go, it couldn’t have reflected Song’s directorial vision more perfectly: elegant, restrained, but with just the right amount of playful humor to steer it away from anything too severe.
Over the past six months, Song has worked with stylist Britt Theodora to continue delivering brilliant variations on that theme: outfits that are typically black-and-white, with tailoring as their backbone, then elevated with a touch of the subversive or surreal. (A floor-length Thom Browne skirt suit with a subtle patchwork detail across the jacket, say, or a boxy Prada blazer cut from thick black wool and paired with an office-drone tie.) And she hasn’t been the only women director making her mark on the red carpet this awards season. Across the head-spinning number of ceremonies and galas and lunches that serve as waypoints on the long road to the Oscars, at least one of this year’s crop of buzzed-about women filmmakers—Greta Gerwig, Justine Triet, A.V. Rockwell, Emerald Fennell, and Sofia Coppola among them—has found themselves in the proximity of a best-dressed list every single time.
Why, exactly, have women directors come to dominate the red carpet in force this awards season? Of course, the simple (and somewhat depressing) explanation is that there are more of them around than usual. The dramatic gender imbalance that typically defined the Oscar categories outside of acting has—slowly, and with much stuttering along the way—begun to right itself over the past few years, partly thanks to the Academy making increasing efforts to diversify its voting body. Looking back at Oscars history, the data makes for bleak reading: out of the 476 nominees in the category of best director, less than 2%—or eight directors total—have been women, and half of these nominations have occurred since 2010. Only once have two women been nominated in the same year (Chloe Zhao and Emerald Fennell in 2021) and even as recently as last year, there was an all-male list of nominees.
Yet however bracing those statistics may be, when it comes to the rich variety of fashion sensibilities these directors have brought to their outings over the past six months, it doesn’t tell the full story. What has felt most striking, perhaps, is how—as with Zhao’s Loewe suit—each of these directors has refused to hew to any kind of prescribed formula for what they wear. Instead, they’ve gravitated towards outfits that feel visibly, well, them.
While riding the Barbie rollercoaster, Gerwig has worked with stylist Karla Welch to deliver a handful of Old Hollywood moments, like the Fendi -bias-cut black gown and opera gloves she wore to the Golden Globes, alongside more offbeat choices, courtesy of designers like Molly Goddard, Jil Sander, and 16Arlington. On the other hand, Sundance breakout A.V. Rockwell, the writer and director behind the searing Teyana Taylor-led family drama A Thousand and One, has worked with Jason Rembert (he of Issa Rae and Lily Gladstone fame) to lean into full-throttle glamour, wearing gowns by the likes of Louis Vuitton and Elie Saab.
My personal favorite? Justine Triet, the French filmmaker behind the masterful Anatomy of a Fall, who has been delivering an equally masterful run of smart-casual looks—no stylist needed. With a particular emphasis on Margiela pieces from her own wardrobe, as well as breezy suits and men’s shirts borrowed from her friend Christophe Lemaire, it’s all about killer tailoring with a hearty dash of Gallic insouciance. (If you look at one look and one look only within this article, let it be Triet’s leather blouson jacket with a shearling collar she wore to the Santa Barbara Film Festival. I’m still thinking about it nearly a month later.) In an interview with the (must-follow, by the way) Hagop Kourounian of @DirectorFits, Triet described her approach to red carpet dressing as inspired by a jumble of sartorial archetypes: River Phoenix’s oversized ’90s blazers, the louche dressing of Gena Rowlands in a Cassavetes movie, Kurt Cobain at the height of the grunge movement.
It only makes sense, really, that directors—who spend so much time inhabiting the minds of their cast of characters—should take a more character-driven approach to clothing than your average red-carpet starlet. And it’s worth acknowledging here that there’s a long history of directors who are known for rocking enormous fits. (Forgive me.) Just take the spiffy velvet suits of Francis Ford Coppola in the 1970s, or the jazzy short-sleeve shirts and bomber jackets of Spike Lee in the ’90s, or the bold colors and bottle sunglasses of Agnès Varda throughout every stage of her decades-long career. (And a shout-out for the special place Yohji Yamamoto occupies within the fashion pantheon of filmmakers: Yohji-san’s fan club includes Steve McQueen, who walked for the designer in 2009, and Wim Wenders, who was spotted on the front row at Paris Fashion Week just last week.)
That’s also without mentioning the fashion designers who have pivoted to become directors themselves: whether Tom Ford with his critically acclaimed dramas A Single Man and Nocturnal Animals—all featuring clothes of his own design front and center, naturally—or the Rodarte sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s Kirsten Dunst-starring A24 psychological horror Woodshock, which they were partly inspired to make after working on costumes for Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. And more recently, there’s a new generation of filmmakers who are regularly spotted not just on the fashion week front rows—Saint Omer director Alice Diop at Chanel and Chloe, for example, or the wildly stylish Janicza Bravo taking in the latest looks at Schiaparelli and Simone Rocha—but actively collaborating with fashion houses too, via programs like Miu Miu Women’s Tales and Chanel’s Through Her Lens. The industries of fashion and film have—on paper at least—never been more intertwined.
Yet that hasn’t stopped many women directors from continuing to feel they have to opt for a certain “look” to be taken seriously—particularly within an industry where opportunities for women at the higher rungs of filmmaking remain scarce, and misogyny still runs rife. Last November, in an interview with Vogue’s podcast The Run Through, Emerald Fennell discussed the strange pressure of being a female director and figuring out the “appropriate” way to dress while promoting your film. “It’s sort of interesting: you either get to wear a suit, like a man, or there are dresses that are really for an actor wanting to go to Venice and have a big fashion moment,” Fennell said. “Trying to find the in-between of—yes, I’m a serious woman in my own right, but I also love a feather and a little glitter.” (Thankfully, the conundrum didn’t deter Fennell from turning some serious looks over the past few months: she jokingly described her press tour style vibe to The Run Through hosts Chioma Nnadi and Chloe Malle as “evil, unapproachable, business sex witch,” and delivered on that promise with plenty of dramatic, sweeping gowns by Valentino and Armani.)
When you really think about it, the reason why it’s directors specifically—and not the sound designers, or the screenwriters, or even, a lot of the time, the actors—who really know how to nail a red carpet moment is probably obvious. The best filmmakers are marked out by not only their clarity of vision but their conviction in bringing it to life, and many of the fashions sported by this year’s wave of awards season directors feel perfectly attuned to their instincts as artists; the wit and bombast of Fennell’s gowns, say, or the subdued tailoring with a twist preferred by Song. But just as movies directed by women fall victim to bias when it comes time for the Academy to fill in their ballots, and end up underrepresented in the nominations, so too is there an inherent bias in the expectations of what directors of different genders “can” or “should” wear.
We all know there’s no obligation for a female director to dress up on the red carpet in a certain way—even if the likes of Sofia Coppola with her ever-revolving wardrobe of Chanel, or Atlantique director Mati Diop’s dazzling collection of Miu Miu looks proves you can have plenty of fun if you do. Want to keep things casual, like Triet, and wear a Nirvana T-shirt with a blazer? Go for it. Fancy leaning into full glamour like Rockwell in a slinky black Louis Vuitton gown at the Directors Guild Awards? Sounds great. Want to rock a denim chore jacket like Kelly Reichardt at the Independent Spirits? Of course! (Having said that, even Reichardt’s seemingly subdued outfit betrays her exacting filmmaker’s eye for detail: there’s a reason the jacket falls halfway along the thigh just so, and the trousers have that subtle kick flare. But I digress.)
Really, the joy of these outfits boils down to the simple joy of dressing up—and the joy of watching people dress up, on their own terms. As the fashion industry continues to extend its tentacles deeper into Hollywood, ensuring that every starlet and her stylist now has a major brand contract from their first breakout role, it leads not just to a certain predictability on the red carpet (Her? In Chanel? Again?) but also flattens out the quirks that might make an actor’s sartorial instincts actually interesting. With this year’s crop of directors, there’s none of that—and it’s refreshing to know you’re seeing someone’s personal eye for fashion reflected in their clothing. That’s real style, after all.
