Red-carpet catastrophes: the dressing-downs and the sharp ripostes
|
Version 0 of 1. In a chuckle-rich article in last week's Radio Times, the comedian Sarah Millican has rebuffed the critics of the (John Lewis-bought, really not that bad) dress she wore to last year's Baftas. "I was in newspapers, pilloried for what I was wearing. I was discussed and pulled apart on Lorraine… Putting clothes on is such a small part of my day. They may as well have been criticising me for brushing my teeth differently to them… I felt wonderful in that dress. And surely that's all that counts." Over the years a great many famous people, doing the clothes-horse bit on a red carpet somewhere, have come in for stick. But which struck back with the best Millican-like rebuttals? Celine Dion Attending the Oscars in 1999, Dion wore a shiny white suit. Backwards. People really, really took the piss. The rebuttal "I'm very comfortable in my body, suit forward or backward," said the unabashed singer in 2007. "If everybody wants to fight for the [right] dress, well, go fight then. I don't need that shit." Uma Thurman "Like a nun in a cossack factory," wrote one critic of Thurman's bizarre Oscars get-up in 2004. The rebuttal "We've gotten so savvy with stylists that it's like a kind of warfare of defensive dressing out there," Thurman said some weeks after the event. "You get bored. That's when you have to say: I will be worst‑dressed!" Björk The singer was widely lampooned for dressing as a swan for the Oscars in 2001. The rebuttal Recalling the event in 2011, Björk said: "What surprises me is that [critics of the outfit] thought I was trying to fit in but got it wrong, that I expected everyone to be wearing peacock dresses and gorilla outfits... I had brought six ostrich eggs with me, and I was dropping them carefully on the red carpet." Jessie J The singer wore a sequinned catsuit to the Brit awards in February, and nobody seemed to mind. It was her choice of lilac lipstick (maybe a bit corpse-like) that caught flak. The rebuttal Succinctness was the trick, here. "The lip[stick] didn't work," she tweeted, hours after the event. "Get over it. I have." |