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You know someone's all out of runway for their cause when they start throwing around words like "decency".
At the 11th hour to the start of this year's film festival in the glittering French coastal resort of Cannes — the same town that once banned the public "modest dressing" of the burkini from its beaches — decided to ban overly revealing dresses on the red carpet, all in pursuit of what authorities call "decency".
Neither can you wear a long train that will stop "the smooth flow of guests". But you must, if you're a woman, still wear high heels as you stumble, sans long gown, up those fabled stairs.
Yes, Cannes has always had an eccentric and controlling dress code — tuxedos only for men, no flats for women — but when the battleground becomes the body, then forget "quiet luxury": for many in the fashion world this new ban is being seen as a kind of quiet conservatism, and a new, insidious surge in the policing of women's bodies.
It's the strangest decision. If Cannes has been one thing for the majority of those who are even aware of it, it's a provocative fashion parade, of breasts, legs and nipples at every turn. It's the French way, n'est-ce pas?
The event can expect front pages around the world when models, stars and starlets turn up in see-through frocks and enormous gowns — Bella Hadid in a 10-denier stocking dress; Irina Shayk in … duct tape?
I would have thought that a part of the world that relies for its libertarian fortunes on tax-dodging oligarchs, monarchs and patriarchs can't really afford to stride the wobbly moral high ground of a dress code ban that finds a free nipple the most appalling thing in its sight … and yet here we are.
But Cannes has always been a rather weird film festival. It sets itself apart, demanding to be regarded as the most serious and significant cinema market in the world, citing its own revered French film history as its guardrails, and yet it gives an eight-minute standing ovation to the latest chapter of a movie franchise like Mission:Impossible, while celebrating its culture of "le booing" to loudly deride other movies that don't land.
The hypocrisy of the new ban is almost charming. Cannes is supposed to express the epitome of film culture in any year, and while I don't want to say that Cannes as a festival doesn't seem to know what it's got going for it … it clearly doesn't. Because why are most of us aware of this two-week spring break for the movie set? Because ever since ambitious starlets of the 50s turned up on the Croisette wearing little more than a cravat for banks of obliging photographers, the main reason anyone outside of the film industry knew the festival even existed at all was because of what women wore — or didn't.
For decades the festival's sexy reputation has derived from hopeful young women willing to come and take her clothes off for a shot at fame.
But clearly, it's taken years for catatonic Cannes authorities to finally express how shocked — shocked, I tell you — they must have felt at Jane Birkin's repeated braless wearing of sheer dresses on the red carpet throughout the 70s.
France fiercely defends its libertarian reputation and open-minded celebration of the body and will present even its most pervy expressions of that sensibility as a marker of is anti-puritanism and sophistication.
That 2016 "burkini" ban was Cannes giving the French general burqa ban a Riviera touch. Images of armed police officers on the beach forcibly requiring a woman to remove her clothing whipped around the world. Only a city that leans heavily on decades of fame created via breast-baring Brigitte Bardots could twist itself into a logical knot like this.
What seems even more hypocritical is the long French tradition of exploiting female nudity in their films: it's galling that Cannes authorities only seem to get the horrors about exposed flesh when it's women and their stylists who are in charge of what gets seen, not a male director.
So, what is this ban really about? It's been a scant seven years since Cate Blanchett led a powerful protest on the Cannes red carpet to highlight the lack of female directors at the festival and in the film industry: Blanchett joined 82 other women, representing the only 82 films by female directors that had competed for the Palme d'Or compared to 1645 by men — and what's happened in the years since that protest? Virtually nothing has changed. In 2024 only four out of 24 films in the main competition were by women.
You won't see many women-directed films this year either, and now neither do you have to be tormented by bits of the bodies who made them — the blokes who run the joint have now figured out just one more way to control them.
Margaret Atwood famously said that every instance of female suppression she included in her horrifyingly prescient novel, The Handmaid's Tale, could be found somewhere in history. And as the grip of restraint and control tightens around women everywhere, it's important to remember that. So, to paraphrase Maya Angelou, when libertarian France tries to show you who it really is, believe it. As a Cannes audience might put it: "booooo!"
This weekend, spend some time with one of my favourite poets, Ocean Vuong. His collection Time is a Mother lives by my bedside, and he's having a moment right now.
Have a safe and happy weekend as Canadian ensemble, Arcade Fire, tap into the New Order DNA in all of us with their new album, Pink Elephant. I always loved their album, Neon Bible, and this is a slightly cooler departure from that. Here's the first single. Go well. |
