Couture Rises from Red Carpet Fashion

As we remember when Rihanna accepted her Fashion Icon honors at the CFDA Awards last year, the fact that her dress was by the talented young designer Adam Selman was remarked upon by hard-core fashion people everyone else was riveted by "That. Body". Marilyn Monroe's notorious "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" dress, to which that Rihanna look drew many a comparison, looks like a Venetian-blind-obscured window compared to Rihanna's all-access pass. And her devil-may-care attitude on the red carpet only accentuated the daring of the look. On the red carpet she teased E! News: "Do my tits bother you? They're covered in Swarovski crystals!" Her body confidence was infectious

 

It was all about the nude dress at Monday night's Met Gala, where Jennifer Lopez, Beyonce and Kim Kardashian managed to capture the spotlight at an event celebrating fashion by wearing very little of it.

The emphasis on the body is just as undemocratic as the emphasis on fashion. Regular people can't afford red-carpet gowns, but the cost of a red-carpet body is almost more prohibitive, between the trainers, nutritionists, diets, and assorted tweaking involved. Clothing used to be the ultimate status symbol, conveying class and cultural currency, now it's almost superfluous compared to the infrastructure underneath. Designers like Balmain's Olivier Rouseteing and Givenchy's Riccardo Tisci cater to their toned and voluptuous clientele with increasingly body-con looks, while Donatella Versace has been working this angle to perfection for decades, complementing the work comes in a one  Met Gala in NYC gala night every year where Actress, Artist, Famous icons from Hollywood gathered together to celebrate and give thanks for there outstanding fashion work that gives indisputable win for a designer, this trend does raise the question of whether designers are being recognized for their handiwork or merely their adjacency to celebrity flesh.

When Beyoncé step down on the red carpet, no question ask, the body and beauty idolized and envy by others took at that night in such classy and sexy fashion. Beyoncé Knowles's sense of style can be traced directly to her mom Tina, who sewed all of her daughter's performance outfits since well before the days of Destiny's Child. Fashion plays an essential role in her life, whether she's performing, walking a red carpet, or sitting courtside at a basketball game.

 

  

 

By now we're all well aware that Beyoncé is full of surprises, but Queen Bey took things to an entirely new level when she showed up to the Met Gala in NYC on Monday well after the reporters and photographers had begun leaving the red carpet. She shared a photo of herself on Instagram with the unassuming caption, "Met Gala 2015," before posting more shots to her personal blog this particular snap was the most liked photo of the evening! Beyoncé wore a sheer, bejeweled Givenchy dress with a high ponytail, and she looked to be posing in a backstage area of the Met

Kim Kardashian looks stunning dress at red carpet in a very revealing sexy gown that turns everyone heads on him, as she wear a hourglass figure with its form-fitting design and see-through inserts in all of the right places, Dundas made sure Kim winged it at tonight's Met Gala, and it's one of the best looks we've seen on her to date thanks to its manic simplicity.

A very dramatic and elegant appearance as she walks together with his husband Kanye West with its hourglass body makes you say "WOW" and no words can describe her outfit that night.

Jeniffer Lopez a.k.a J.Lo brought her signature brand of sexy to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala, wearing one of the most revealing gowns she’s worn in recent memory. Stunned in a red ombré dress featuring a sequin dragon design (her take on the theme “China: Through the Looking Glass”) that kept her naughty bits covered, plus, a curve-loving mermaid silhouette and a tulle train speckled with sequins that looked to be in the shape of flames. Full-on matchy-matchy moment, adding a red crystal Swarovski clutch and even fiery eyeshadow. She completed her look with sleek, straight strands and a soft lip. 

There's nothing new under the sun, and people have been pulling from the well-thumbed sexy-dress playbook for centuries, but skin-baring on the red carpet is now dominating even supposedly fashion-focused events like the Met Gala or the CFDA Awards. We've officially entered a realm that you might call post-fashion. The body is the new outfit. The gym is the new atelier. Curves and indentations that were once sculpted by corsetry, boning, panniers, strategic padding.

The rise of athleisure with everyone running around in fitted Lycra casings that may not be high-design but give you an exact sense of what they're working with  has permeated evening wear as well. Of course, bodies have always been subject to trends but the ideal body type right now is a particularly tricky feat of engineering simultaneously curvy and toned, voluptuous and meager, a body has to look like the product of work.

Is this good or bad for fashion, Designers will never be superfluous  as much as celebrity attire increasingly teeters on the brink of almost-naked, no one is going to show up totally naked. But now designers have to work harder to stand out. Niceties of silhouette, print, and embellishments unless they're doing their part to obscure body parts, get less attention. And designers no longer dictate hemlines or create an overarching new look.