A Case Against the Worst Dressed List

With the initiation of awards season comes chaos for fashion designers who specialize in (or are at least familiar with) formal wear, the stylists who select the designer wear and the ultimate clients, who are expected to appear on this red carpet that is bolstered by an award ceremony in these conceptions that are, essentially, the sartorial equivalent of the precise backslash career we keep coming back to. Because as red carpet culture would have it now, the celebrities who dress for said carpet are not only expected to perform excellently in their chosen occupations (the precise reason that lands them at these ceremonial events to begin) but they are also supposed to be style icons.

The problem with this, of course, is that to be a style icon is to identify with oneself — to emit a sense of genuine identity that is expressed originally and creatively. Of note is probably that most of these people are being lauded for pretending to be other people. And when the big bad b-word — business — comes into the picture, and designers and stylists and public opinion can dig their teeth, no matter how shallowly, into the notion of style, the principles on which style is built: authenticity and singularity, are questioned.

A group of worst dressed lists that populated on Monday following the Golden Globes seemed to have systematically taken every look I identified with and called its fashion bluff. It was hugely infuriating — specifically because all parties involved in the backlash: the stylist, the celebrity, the designer and the viewers who related to the look, hung at the wrath of unwarranted scrutiny. Worst dressed lists are polarizing. They are grating. They accommodate a point of view that runs so distinctly counter to the tenets of style — that the “popular opinion” (meanwhile, who is to say that a Worst Dressed list’s author represents the popular opinion?) is the only opinion — I almost wish more people took to meditated bad dressing on the red carpet.

At least with “bad dressing” there’s a point of view being conveyed. Sometimes it’s humorous, often it’s quirky and there is an unmistakable sense of charm linked to what is candid truthfulness. It’s a sense of expression that, through better or worse, attempts to fight for interpretation. What we’re seeing more and more is a sea of passive dressing — the heartbreaking equivalent of indifference in the scheme of love and hate — that evokes no emotion at all and just numbingly keeps a set of wheels we can see but not quite use in motion.

Of course, one cannot watch the red carpet the same way a runway is to be watched. That’s like eating an apple and facing disappointment when inevitably, it doesn’t taste like an orange. We can, however, fight for emotion. For emotion and for character and the adversity that has been largely absent, perhaps due to the fear of worst dressed lists, from red carpets. Only then can we — and we should want to — celebrate bad.