Most celebrities look good on a red carpet. (The hair will be neat, the skin unblemished and the gowns inoffensive.) But I often yearn for a time in pop culture when Björk posed in stuffed swan dresses, Celine Dion in back-to-front John Galliano tuxedos, and Lizzy Gardiner in 254 expired Amex Cards. It takes more than elegance–which is little more than an expectation being met–to inspire the imagination and move fashion forward.
Emma Corrin understands this. The actor’s partnership with stylist Harry Lambert has produced some of the most memorable red-carpet moments of the 2020s. See: the Pierrot-inspired Miu Miu dress worn at the Golden Globes in 2021; the Miu Miu bonnet and fingerless gloves selected for the Emmys in 2021; and the JW Anderson minidress designed to resemble a goldfish tied up in a plastic bag at the premiere of My Policeman in 2022. These were successful not because Corrin looked glamorous, but because they unsettle the glamorous.
The actor last night returned to the red carpet for the premiere of Wolverine in a peak-shouldered minidress with garter straps, thigh-high stockings and peep-toe heels. It had an off-kilter sex appeal–high-powered, old-fashioned, undone–and was plucked from Anthony Vaccarello’s fall 2024 collection for Saint Laurent. Proof perhaps that the red carpet is not just a platform for someone’s perceived prettiness, but the eccentricities of their mind.