A custom gown that took 130 artisans a combined 22,160 hours to produce was the perfect way to honor one of fashion history’s most famously spontaneous moments. If only irony always looked this glamorous.
At the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, supermodel Bella Hadid attended the premiere of Antonin Baudry’s Charles de Gaulle biopic “La Bataille de Gaulle” in a form-fitting ivory gown by Schiaparelli. From its trompe l’œil lace embroidery to the dark brooch holding everything together, the French couture house‘s inspiration was clear: the crochet floral dress that late style icon Jane Birkin wore to the Union of the Artists gala in Paris in 1969.
In contrast to Hadid’s picture-perfect styling, Birkin’s outfit had resulted from a last-minute wardrobe fix — one that epitomized her gloriously blithe approach to fashion. Believing her neckline to be too high, the English socialite decided to wear her Emilio Pucci dress backwards. In doing so, she turned a backless gown into a daringly plunging one. Birkin then fastened the front — or what had become the front — with a bejeweled black brooch, achieving that rare feat of being both boho and risqué at the same time.
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A tribute to spontaneity — made by committee
Almost six decades later, moments of such sartorial insouciance have all but disappeared from the red carpet. There are simply too many cameras, contracts and armchair critics to appease these days, and everyone is a brand ambassador. But let this not be a criticism of Hadid, her longtime stylist Mimi Cuttrell or the gown’s creator, Schiaparelli creative director Daniel Roseberry, who together created an outfit befitting the moment.
This was not a like-for-like homage, by any means. The back of the gown was very much Roseberry’s own, with an outsize black bow resting gently above a spine of corset-style lacing. Where Birkin’s dress ended with a simple floor-length hemline, Hadid’s featured a tiered mermaid train that trailed gracefully behind her at the Palais des Festivals.
Roseberry read the room — and the fine print
Roseberry, as ever, had read the room. But he also read the new Cannes dress code. Roseberry chose to tinker at its edges, if not disregard it entirely.
Last year, the storied film festival took a stand against exposed skin. In apparent response to the proliferation of “naked” dresses, organizers explicitly banned any form of nudity on the red carpet — or indeed any other part of the event — for “decency reasons.” The new rules also forbid overly voluminous outfits, lest they “hinder the proper flow of traffic of guests and complicate seating.” Had the rules applied retroactively, Hadid would have fallen foul more than once, most memorably in 2024, when she wore an exceptionally sheer Saint Laurent look that may even have influenced organizers’ decision to take a stand.
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Cannes guidelines make clear that excessively nude transgressors won’t make it onto the carpet at all. “Welcoming teams will be obligated to prohibit red carpet access to anyone not respecting these rules,” reads the festival’s online dress code FAQ. That must mean that Hadid successfully toed the line this time, despite putting both cleavage and underwear on display.
The irony cuts both ways: a tribute to a famously unplanned look required thousands of hours of coordinated craftsmanship, while the festival’s nudity ban forced a calculated reveal rather than an accidental one.
What Birkin might have thought
Quite what Birkin would have made of Hadid’s tribute will never be known — she died in 2023 aged 76. But one suspects she would have approved. While usually keeping things demure at Cannes, Birkin arguably pioneered barely-there fashion with the sheer sweater dress she wore to the 1969 premiere of French film “Slogan,” although she later revealed she hadn’t realized how transparent it was. “This is the flash effect of the photographers’ camera,” Birkin told a fashion magazine. “If I had known, I would not put knickers on!”
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