We regret to inform your Instagram feed that there will be no exposed nipples on the Cannes Film Festival’s red carpet this year. There will, officially, “for decency reasons,” be no nudity at all. No “naked dressing” then and also apparently none of the opposite: “voluminous outfits,” including dresses with attention-dragging trains.
All this is new, ever since the opulent 12-day affair that kicked off Tuesday announced these rules just a day earlier. And, given how much fun the celebrities who show up have had over the years wearing not much or too much on the red carpet, in order to look their best and maybe set themselves up for a viral moment, the whole thing seems especially galling.
Yes, it’s inconvenient for the stars, who plan their outfits months in advance. It’s also bad for us, the fans, who live for this stuff that we obviously ourselves can never wear.
The Cannes power play is tone-deaf at best, and misogynistic at worst. It also comes at a time when women’s autonomy over their bodies is being threatened worldwide. “It’s really not up to any person ,” said the stylist Karla Welch, whose clients include Hailey Bieber, Tracee Ellis Ross and Karlie Kloss, “to tell women how to express themselves.” She added, “It’s not up to a governing body to tell us how to be in the world. We don’t need governing bodies governing our bodies.”
“In our red-carpet culture, if a woman just wears a pretty dress, oh, she’s so boring. Oh, she’s so plain,” said Mickey Boardman, the director of special projects at Paper magazine. “Women get crucified no matter what they do. You tell them they have to be one thing and now you’re punishing them. It’s ridiculous.” .
As for the order to turn down the volume, perish the thought that a woman (or anyone of any gender expression who deigns to don a gown, for that matter) dares to take up a little space, as the Dominican actress Massiel Taveras did last year with an exuberant train that cascaded down the famed Cannes steps. She ended up in a verbal altercation with a security guard after fanning out her frock. That same year, the same security guard stepped on the end of Kelly Rowland’s dress.
I wanted to know if this where these rules come from, from the bad press Cannes rightly got? But the press office did not directly respond. It did email this to me: “The Cannes Film Festival has made explicit in its charter certain rules that have long been in effect,” adding, “The aim is not to regulate attire per se, but to prohibit full nudity on the red carpet, in accordance with the institutional framework of the event and French law. In cases where garments are excessively voluminous, the festival reserves the right to deny access to individuals whose attire could obstruct the movement of other guests or complicate seating arrangements in the screening rooms.”
I find it hard to believe that the Oscars — not to mention the Met Gala — can accommodate outsize outfits but Cannes cannot. I asked the press office to define “full nudity,” to confirm if sheer outfits were permissible, and explain who, exactly, demanded that this sartorial manifesto. They have yet to reply.
Particularly frustrating is how the festival is asserting control over how women present their bodies on the red carpet when there are no rules about nudity in the films being screened. Apparently, it’s fine for an actor to strip down when a director demands it, but when she chooses to showcase her body on her own terms, it violates decorum.
The Cannes festival has never been so puritanical. Save the controversy surrounding the expectation that women wear high heels, which led the likes of Julia Roberts and Kristen Stewart to walk the red carpet barefoot in 2016 and 2018, respectively, its fashion has historically been wonderfully rebellious and risqué. Jane Birkin slithered down the famed staircase in a dress slit above her hip in 1974. Madonna stripped down to Jean Paul Gaultier lingerie in 1991. Yet now, in 2025, a dress that slightly exposes an areola is somehow lewd.
“Fashion and entertainment are deeply intertwined,” said the fashion commentator Nicky Campbell. “Cannes is a highly visible global red carpet and has become one of the premier stages to make a fashion statement, and the new dress code is such a hindrance to that.”
Some have suggested that the no-nudity rule is a response to Bianca Censori’s entirely see-through mesh dress at the Grammys. Hanan Besovic, an online fashion commentator, blamed the rise of the right: “Everything is going more conservative.” Cannes, he said, is failing to understand both its guests and its audience. “You’re telling me that people in the film industry don’t know how to make their own choices about what is appropriate?”
And to be fair, there has been something of a naked-dressing race to go viral at major events in recent years. There have been examples “where it’s just gone too far and doesn’t speak to the essence of what the fashion is,” said Sally LaPointe, a designer who frequently incorporates sheer fabrics into her collections. She contends that the style is here to stay. “Women are empowered. And they don’t want to be told what they can and cannot do,” she said.
Cher made history in a translucent, beaded Bob Mackie gown at the 1974 Met Gala, as did Beyoncé in 2012 in her beaded black-mesh mermaid gown trimmed in violet plumes by Givenchy. With a subtle modesty panel around the torso, it was considerably covered up when compared with today’s sheer specimens, but it was a great moment for the “Free the Nipple” movement.
All that is to say that looks, like the gauzy, strategically revealing Saint Laurent dress that Bella Hadid wore to Cannes last year, have become commonplace. Saint Laurent is owned by Kering, a Cannes festival partner. At least a few of the label’s spring 2025 runway looks could arguably be categorized as “naked.” These new rules potentially put stars who the brand agreed to dress in a diaphanous design in a conundrum.
And at the very least, the timing of the dress-code change was utterly impractical. Halle Berry said she had to swap dresses at the last minute, for fear of violating the volume rule. But Ms. Hadid, arguably, broke the new rules on Tuesday in her revealing Saint Laurent dress.
One could argue that the Cannes memo portends a naked-dressing fatigue, though I’m not sure that whoever’s in charge of the festival dress-code memos is qualified to lord over Western fashion’s cultural and aesthetic shifts. Which raises the question of who is in control here. It even makes one question the authenticity of the festival’s 2018 response to the #MeToo movement and the Harvey Weinstein scandal, which was particularly embarrassing for Cannes given his deep-seated involvement with the institution. That year, Cannes championed female directors, who have been notably underrepresented throughout much of the festival’s eight decades.
Please, governing bodies, stop attempting to dictate how grown women — how grown anyone — must look, dress and behave. Fashion, like film, is about free expression. Don’t ruin everyone’s good time.
Katharine K. Zarrella is a writer and editor and the fashion critic at large at Document Journal. She lectures at New York’s Parsons School of Design and London’s Central Saint Martins.
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