When Red Carpets Become Runways for Control
At Cannes, spectacle used to be the point.
If you don’t believe me, search for it. Google image the last decade of red carpets and you’ll find a visual archive of cultural declarations, not just outfits. Trains that trailed like myth, bodies wrapped in glass-like sheerness, and silhouettes too loud to sit still in. The red carpet was more than fashion — it was punctuation. It was punctuation in a system that rarely allows for interruption.
And now that punctuation has been erased.
This year, the Grand Théâtre Lumière — the crown jewel of the Cannes Film Festival — updated its dress code. Sheer garments are banned. So are voluminous gowns with large trains. The reason? “For decency reasons,” they said, and to ensure the “flow of traffic.” Code for “stop causing a scene.”
But let’s not pretend this is about traffic flow or functionality.
This is about control.
Fashion isn’t just adornment. It’s expression. It’s language. It’s culture, protest, sovereignty. It is, and has always been, a form of self-authoring — whether you’re cloaking yourself in minimalism or stepping out in something maximalist and impossible to ignore. So when a body in a dress is denied access to space because the dress “takes up too much of it,” the message is painfully clear:
Make yourself smaller.
And yet, I can’t help but ask, would Beyoncé be turned away? If she showed up in a sheer Balmain masterpiece or a velvet train that required two people to carry, would they enforce the same rule? Or is this about who the rules are for?
There’s a deeper undercurrent here — and it isn’t new. It’s something we’ve seen echoed in whispers about the Met Gala too. Stories circulating that every look now must be “pre-approved” by a committee. Real or rumor, the effect is the same: fashion institutions are attempting to systematize rebellion, tame expression, and sanitize the very thing that made these events culturally potent in the first place.
Cannes used to be where fashion collided with cinema and where the screen ended and the story continued down the staircase. The drama, the scale, the sheer — it wasn’t noise. It was the point. Think Bella Hadid’s liquid YSL in 2024. Elle Fanning’s otherworldly McQueen moment in 2023. Or Rihanna redefining maternity on the carpet. These weren’t just fashion moments. They were culture shifts, authored by stylists who understand the body as performance, not just presence.
So when Cannes rolls out a policy like this, it’s not just rejecting fabric, it’s rejecting narrative. It’s rejecting certain kinds of noise — the kinds made by those who aren’t deemed safe, palatable, or historically welcomed in these spaces. These rules don’t just regulate clothing, they regulate gesture, while muting aesthetic resistance. And why should style always behave?
Cannes claims this is about “decency,” but decency is a moving target when women’s bodies are being policed. The truth is that decency is often used as a tool of erasure. A soft censorship that feels logistical, but is deeply political.
Because when you ban the sheer, you ban the erotic as sacred. When you ban the voluminous, you ban visibility itself.
It’s not a coincidence that some of the most radical red carpet moments of the last decade came from women, femmes, Black and queer creatives who used fashion as scale, softness, and sharpness sometimes all at once. To see them take up space wasn’t just beautiful – it was unruly. And that refusal to shrink is what’s being legislated in the Cannes’ new dress code.
And yet, stylists keep building temples out of thread and imagination. Even as committees tighten their grips and “approval” becomes currency, stylists are still finding ways to speak — through cut, color, and silhouette. They are the unsung architects of fashion’s rebellion, and the last thing we need is another institution telling them they’re too much.
Fashion was never meant to fit the frame. It was made to break it.
So let them fear the train and the sheer.
Let them fear a woman walking like she knows she belongs in every room — because she does.