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The most impressive performance at the 15th Metro FM Music Awards was Bonang Matheba at work. She was so consummate and stellar at her job that her co-host, my favourite music radio DJ Mo Flava, burnt to a frazzle in her light. They should have let her present on her own, I thought.
But enough of that, because what we’ve ended up talking about more is what she wore. We did the same with this week’s female Oscar winners and attendees, for whom the fashion honours reach their crescendo at the awards.
The news of who wore it best at The Oscars rolled in faster than think pieces on Lady Gaga’s song against rape or Chris Rock’s talk on race. Fashion is now such a major part of public events that it enters politics, including state of the nation addresses here in South Africa.
Fashion is political. It’s strange that awards fashion should make so much news when, every year, women, the most scrutinised group on the red carpet, to be both lauded and vilified, arrive looking like Barbies with buns or some version of an old Hollywood starlet.
So insatiable are our appetites for set standards of glamour, we happily gag on glitter and sequins.
It does, then, seem like a defiant act when a woman decides to attend The Oscars in jeans, a fake leather jacket and flat shoes. This was Jenny Beavan, who won an award for her costume design for Mad Max: Fury Road, and arrived as the antithesis to what is “acceptable awards fashion”. That she chose comfort over shimmying around in a mermaid dress and stilettos makes so much sense because those frocks are not designed with her in mind.
They are for the lithe and translucent, the Cate Blanchetts of the silver screen. Beavan was not making a statement, though her jacket paid homage to Mad Max. The woman has a bad back, and struggling up that gauntlet of stairs to the podium in high heels would have been imbecilic. By virtue of being different, amid a sea of women who look like pageant finalists, she ended up commanding attention.
For Bonang and Hollywood actresses, there is a payoff for being reduced to a lace dress with a train and heels, especially if they fit the established frame – long legs and hair.
What’s the excuse for the rest of us for playing within the confines of the carefully controlled and old codes? Attending events wearing what we’ve been told: Western styles of dress conforming to standard aesthetics, long, flowy princess dresses and sparkly Cinderella sandals. Bridal boutiques are teeming with sweatheart necklines and trains, as if life were a period drama.
We will change it up with traditional cloth for an occasion, but will insist on keeping a white veil, even if they make it out of scratchy gauze.
Even the world’s powerful women can get locked in. When Vogue decided to honour Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer with a cover, she let herself be talked into appearing like a tech Tinker Bell and not a “tech titan”, as Time magazine called her. She lay on her back, in a constricting shift dress and “house arrest stilettos”. Which makes this a good time to admit that I found our Public Protector’s endless canary-yellow dress so conformist for such a ground-breaking woman.
Many of the Metro Awards A-listers looked like the ghosts of matric dances’ past – long hemlines and slits. There was little imagination.
No art, or hint of symbolism. And this at a time when their peers on campus and on the streets are saying so much using their bare bodies. The youth at the Metros, the most watched among them all, wield one of the most potent art forms in the form of young people’s lexicon and fashion, and yet had nothing to say.
For them, their most daring act was the price tag of their outfit, or the name on a couture dress.
