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The 50s are an awkward decade for women on the red carpet. So, the Oscars, being the ultimate red carpet, are like a dramatisation of the awks, a silent movie told in One Dress After Another. It’s complicated by the convention that “over 50” and “in her 50s” are the same category for Hollywood, the existence of a greater age being so anathema to the condition of womanhood that it’s more tactful not to mention it. Sigourney Weaver (76) is an “Oscars over 50”, as is Goldie Hawn (80).
The case of Hawn was particularly confusing this year. When she was pictured alongside her daughter, Kate Hudson (46), they became the same age, it being semantically easier to pretend that “nearly-50 to 100” is a continuous phase of woman than to brook the idea of an age beyond “middle”.
Anyway, the main problem for actors in their 50s, wardrobe-wise, has traditionally been: are you supposed to dress as your screen age, probably that of the mother or grandmother of a man who is only four years younger than you? Or would it be better to dress as a timeless romantic interest, which would put you 20 years younger than the same man and open you up to criticism such as: “What on earth is she doing showing her upper arms?” Since there is no way for a 50-year-old to exist in fiction, she has no wardrobe in real life, either.
One timeless fix has been to wear a suit, leaning in to the fundamental inequity of the whole enterprise. When all men can dress in exactly the same thing and excite no comment at all, how can it be fair that a woman has to enter this territory in which there are no rules, except there are a thousand, which she won’t know until she has broken them? What’s the age range of a feather boa? How toned are your arms supposed to be? Sequins: mutton or lamb? Nobody knows; you just have to find out.
The suit answer, by the way, has become yet another trap. If you weren’t the first woman to experiment with androgyny (Barbra Streisand, 1969), you will always be benchmarked against Streisand and Jane Fonda, but if you don’t wear a suit, there will always be a smart-alec chorus opining that you would have looked better in a suit.
Ultimately, the problem is philosophical: entering a world in which you cannot exist and yet must exist, you cannot draw attention to yourself, yet all eyes are on you. What is the best way to prepare for that? I would choose a sophisticated camouflage, in which I could blend, chameleon-style, into any backdrop. My dress would be red when I arrived and then, when I sat down, become the exact shade of a chair.
Unsurprisingly, since she is the celebrity’s philosopher queen, Gwyneth Paltrow arrived with a better, or definitely more decisive, answer. I could describe her dress, but it would be far more evocative to watch it in motion – that way, you get the Daily Mail’s mood music. The vibe is very much “this is a horror show; brace yourselves for something absolutely appalling to happen”.
The dress is in two panels, front and back, and the crisis appears to be that they aren’t sewn together, instead joined by two diaphanous side sections through which you can see, well, basically everything. I’ve had anxiety dreams about being naked in which I was wearing more fabric (or, at least, it was not so revealingly arranged).
Paltrow didn’t put out a press release before the dress, which is a pity, as I would have read the hell out of that document. But I think I can take a stab at her message, which is more profound than “I have consciously uncoupled the front and back of my dress”, or even a broader spectrum “I am consciously uncoupling from clothes”.
I think it’s a bold “have at it, world. You’re going to endlessly wonder whether I’m wearing too much or too little, whether I am toned or gaunt or curvy, whether I look good for 53 or not. Let’s give you some actual data.” I don’t even care what she looks like. The medium is the message and the message is magnificent.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
