The artistic directors of Cannes are irritated. Not by red carpet activism or questionable jury decisions, but by bare skin. More precisely: by women like Bianca Censori, who wore a dress at this year's Grammys that wasn't a dress at all. A textile provocation that will still cause a stir in 2025 and will be avoided at Cannes in the future, "for reasons of decency." The Cannes red carpet has always been one of the most interesting. There's no fixation on the dress like at the Oscars, but rather a place where the old myth of glamour meets elegant provocation.
Now the festival has decided: nudity on the red carpet is no longer allowed. Oddly, they didn't care in the least about decency when they offered a stage to anti-Semitic activists. But now, suddenly, sheer fabric is supposed to be too much? In the future, this will also ban an entire fashion category: the naked dress, a variant that breaks with fabric, skin, and expectations. The naked dresses are not a train wreck, but rather calculated stagings, sometimes subversive, sometimes humorous, sometimes simply brilliant. The appearance in it was rarely vulgar, and if it was: Who doesn't like looking at beautiful women's bodies? It was a game with conventions.
A game Cannes used to play with pleasure. What we're seeing now is a remarkable shift. The new prudishness seems like a relapse into an aesthetic of control. The body, once the means of individual expression, is declared a source of moral danger. The new Cannes dress code leads to a look that corresponds almost exactly to the dress code considered a sign of moral superiority in certain urban settings: high collar, but not figure-hugging, academic. An intellectual uniform of draped blouses with bows, linen colors, unvarnished faces, problematic bangs, Biedermeier glasses. Or leftist codes, such as tattoos, bleached hair dye, nose rings.
Freedom, yes, but please, only within the framework of a safe aesthetic. This new Biedermeier fashion is based on an overmotivated feminist idea of no longer dressing for men or according to dominant beauty standards. But all too often, it ends with a protest aesthetic that is the exact opposite of freedom, can never look sexy, and places the female body, of all things, once again under general suspicion. The same circles that want to explain the world through curation now prohibit Hollywood stars from dressing in the same way. Behind the ban on nudity on the red carpet lies the message that freedom of movement is reactionary.
At the same time, modesty is suddenly considered fashionable. The concept of moral covering comes from ideological contexts that have very little to do with Western ideals of freedom. Unfortunately, it is no longer uncommon for European brands to propagate "modest fashion," usually with subtle references to Islamic dress norms. Aesthetic symbols are unquestioningly adopted from systems where clothing is not a choice, but a prescription. A naked dress on the red carpet is not a scandal.
Unless you still believe that a female body is a provocation per se. Anyone who claims this not only misjudges the tradition of fashion as a means of expression, but also entangles themselves in a new form of pseudo-morality: controlling, normative, cowardly. It is also paternalistic and an affront to all those stylists and designers who have mastered the art of staging nudity: as a game, as a contrast, as a sophisticated irritation.
The fact that voluminous clothing was also banned so as not to impede the flow of traffic on the red carpet is merely an attempt to somehow bridge the new dress code from the political to the practical. But what is being negotiated here is more than just an issue. It is about the freedom not to subordinate oneself to a new moral dictate. About the freedom to appear sovereign.
