You Know The Dress Is Good When It Seems It’s Falling Off

If there’s one lesson to be learned from the 79th year of the Festival de Cannes, it’s that the age-old fashion rules do actually rule. Because it’s France, but more particularly because Cannes takes place in the South of France a couple of centuries on from Madame du Barry, Louis XV’s ultra-influential Maîtresse-en-titre, the official mistress-in-chief whose dress, social moves and comportment carried such great weight at Versailles of her day, there have been a few wholly natural Darwinian diversions that have influenced the canon of festive dress as practiced in the 1770s. But just a few.

Fancy dress at events in France may occasionally seem somewhat outrageous, but actually the elements of style and the silhouette are quite stable — a crafted template for the bust and the waist, with an immense volume of fabric working from the waist down as a sort of plinth for the wearer. Pictured top, the always-adventurous Heidi Klum picks intuitively, but counterintuitively, an Azerbaijani design firm, Sophie Couture for her May 21 amfAR gala gear. With a couple of minor edits, that thing would have worked for Madame du Barry.

It will remain an irony of French fashion that the Late Sixties icon in Paris and Cannes was the inimitable English singer and actor Jane Birkin, then in a long liason with France’s leading “bad boy” of music and film, Serge Gainsbourg. Birkin, pictured above on April 25, 1969 attending a Paris gala in the embroidered Emilio Pucci dress that she famously wore backwards because she hated the high neckline when she had it on the right way around. Birkin wanted that deep back slit up front and center. She held it all together with a big black brooch. This caused a great clamor of approval, and a modicum of tepid ooh-la-la disapproval, back in the day.

More to the point of Birkin’s enduring impact on French style, 57 years on from that April in Paris, Birkin’s decision to reverse the Pucci caused Bella Hadid, pictured above headed into the May 20 screening of The Battle of DeGaulle: The Age of Iron, to engage Schiaparelli’s Daniel Roseberry to do a straight-up, forward-facing couture homage, complete with the black brooch. According to the literature, this was a huge job for Schiaparelli’s embroiderers, who took a Sisyphean 22,000 hours to embroider this thing, give or take. We can only hope their eyes are all ok.

Caroline Scheufele, the artistic director and co-president of Chopard, splashed out as per custom and threw the amfAR gala on May 21 at the Hotel du Cap – Eden Roc in Cap d’Antibes. That meant, of course, that Byron, the King Charles spaniel, notable lapdog and occasional Chopard mascot, would be in attendance alongside his mistress, the co-president. With them is Britain’s glamorous Marchioness of Bath, Emma Thynn, whose balletic pose and aerodynamic blue train lift the shot.

Pictured above, the Vieux-Port de Cannes, the “old port” marina, which, in addition to handling many smaller craft, has 58 designated superyacht berths that can handle boats up to 140 meters (459’ 4”) during the 78th Film Festival last May.

Holding to the Madame du Barry gown form, peripatetic Russian expat-still-mysteriously-surviving-on-the-Med Victoria Bonya, a former reality show presenter in Russia and modest fashion entrepreneur, brings a whiff of the Bond franchise’s legendary femmes fatale what with that black cane accessorizing the heck out of that frilly hot pink number. Perhaps this is even one of those not-so-secret red-carpet style-auditions that so plague film awards? Russian expats are often in chronic need of funds, and now that the newly buff and freshly married Jeff Bezos, among others, will have the final say on casting the next Bond, the Amazon/MGM team currently sweating the fact that there has been no Bond release in the last half-decade would be well advised to study their forebears’ work.

To wit: Axiomatically, there is no Bond film possible, unless Bond is given: 1) a giant wasp nest of villians, and 2) a bevy of beach-ready femmes fatale to work through. It never really matters what any of them might aspire to, as long as the first group try to kill as many people as possible along the way (in addition to Bond), and as long as the second group form some sudden, cartoonish emotional attachment to Bond, including bedding him while possibly also trying to kill him for whatever reason.

Note to Mr. and Mrs. Bezos! If you cast her, ask her to bring in the cane! Given the expertise of your very best prop people over at Amazon/MGM, this little white-tipped party-cane of Bonya’s can definitely be fitted with a fine ricin-capsule shooter like the one built into the KGB umbrella-gun was used to shoot and kill BBC writer and Bulgarian-dissident Georgi Markov in London in 1978.

Speaking of budding directors, did we mention that John Travolta, pictured above left with his daughter Ella Bleu at the “Karma” screening on May 15, very much wants to change his position on the set to behind the camera? This is reportedly his logic behind the beret, since he noted that, in historical photographs, quite a number of seriously old-school Hollywood directors wore berets. With all due respect, Mr. Travolta! We can’t find much evidence of Howard Hawks, John Ford, Michael Curtiz, or Billy Wilder in berets. Charlie Chaplin, an Englishman, did in fact wear a beret as an actor spoofing a pretentious director in his 1916 short Behind the Screen. And of course Groucho wore one here and there, spoofing it in his rich, lightning-fast schtick as well.

But let’s not beat around the bush. It’s obvious that Travolta could not be deterred from his disastrous choice of topper. Fine, we’re over that. Problem is, white. Yes, he may have been trying to match the tie or the pocket square, or both, but why a white beret? Asked another way, why a white beret in France? A white beret announces something, we’re not sure exactly what, but the thing is off on a tangent way out there and calls attention to itself in about five hundred ways, none of them winning. We are sure that a standard, time-honored black beret would have matched the suit, set off the face better, and (sort of) disappeared.

We’re also sure that Cecil B. DeMille — to recall a clean-shaven, beret-free director of the old school who showed up before his casts of thousands in his regular business trousers and brogues with his plain, strong, bald head carrying godlike directorial authority — would not have condoned Travolta’s sockless-boulevardier loafer look for the red carpet, either. Get some socks, man! Even the ur-sockless-boulevardier rake, Jude Law, wears socks on the red carpet.

Cape jacket with giant sorceress sleeves, rings very much outside the black see-through gloves, and a breastplate that seems like it would turn a broadsword forms the winning armor for Sharon Stone, pictured above arriving at the screening of Fjord, the eventual Palme d’Or winner.

By contrast, the confident Henry Samuel, whose mother is Heidi Klum and whose father is the British singer Seal (aka, Henry Olusegun Olumide Adeola Samuel), does not require socks with his slip-ons at the amfAR gala on May 21, nor even a shirt. The simple answer to the seeming conundrum is, yes, youth. Mr. Samuel is all of 20 years old at the moment, growing like a reed, and his fitness is clear. The embroidered suit jacket’s long line also works, but at bottom, this kit, and the lack of it, passes muster because it’s carried by the bright, insouciant energy of youth.

Air kissing is an underrated sport in the best of times, but when the pressure’s on — which is to say, when a thousand cameras are focused on those who meet and greet — it can get difficult. En route into the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc for the amfAR Gala on May 21, from left, Eva Longoria, British singer Robbie Williams and his wife Ayda Field Williams attempt the “two-versus-one-we’ll-all-take-turns” variation, which looks like it’s working only somewhat well. Williams is listing too quickly and too far out to his right to make it a passable move for the cameras, and it’s discombobulating Longoria, who’s expecting the embrace. It’s an unfortunate shape he’s throwing. The well-known pop singer has been photographed fifty billion times, but perhaps he needs a quick air-kiss-akido refresher from his trainers responsible for close body work at charity ball entrances.