“I had an amazing dress by [Indian designer Gaurav] Gupta to wear tonight, and I cannot wear it because the train is too big,” Berry, a member of the festival’s jury, said at the first press conference on Tuesday. “So I, of course, am going to follow the rules. So I had to make a pivot.”
“The nudity part, I do think is probably also a good rule,” she added. Girl. I’m certainly not the fashion police, but weren’t you just a sneeze away from a crack slip at the Met Gala??? Anyway.
Frankly, I find policing what women wear at Cannes darkly funny, considering how little it seems to care about policing pedophiles and sex pests. The festival has a storied history of rolling out the red carpet for men like Harvey Weinstein, Gerard Depardieu, Roman Polanski, and Paul Schrader, who literally admitted to the sexual assault and harassment of his assistant at the festival last year. I’ll also note that Juliette Binoche, Cannes jury president, defended Depardieu—a man convicted of sexual assault this week—in the festival’s first press conference.
“He’s not a monster,” she told reporters. “He’s a man who lost his aura owing to facts that occurred and were looked at by a court. The star of a film is a king for me. [But] what is sacred is when you create, when you act, and he is no longer sacred…Now the power lies elsewhere.”
But despite the festival’s track record of platforming the industry’s most problematic men, the president of the festival claims its focus is on improving it for the women who make it worth paying attention to in the first place.
“I am very glad that change continues to take place through strength and courage. Women are finally being heard,” Iris Knobloch said in a press conference announcing the films that will be screened at the festival last month. “The festival is particularly attentive to this, and they (women) are no longer asking for their place, they are taking it. We are honored to amplify their voices, to shine a light on incredible talent that broadens our view of the world.”
So, you’re honored to amplify their voices, so long as their gowns aren’t as loud? Got it.
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