Men’s red carpet looks are notoriously boring, but this year’s Golden Globes offered a glimmer of the unexpected.
At the 2019 Golden Globes on Sunday, gender fluidity surfaced as a major theme on the red carpet, with celebrities like Billy Porter, Judy Greer, and Cody Fern challenging traditional fashion gender norms with their looks.
Golden Globe nominee Porter, star of the groundbreaking FX series Pose, which chronicles the drag ball scene of the 1980s, arrived at the show in a floral embroidered suit and matching cape with a hot pink lining he held open for dramatic effect.
Fern, who starred with Porter on the FX series American Horror Story: Apocalyps e, wore black trousers, curled hair, eye shadow, and a partly see-through shirt. His look was far more subtle than Porter’s but earned him praise from the likes of Vanity Fair, Vogue, and New York Times critic Vanessa Friedman, who commended the actor for elevating the tuxedo with his awards show ensemble.
But Porter and Fern weren’t the only men who stood out on the carpet. There was Timothée Chalamet in a sequined black harness and Golden Globe winner Darren Criss ( The Assassination of Gianni Versace) in a floral tuxedo jacket. These looks are part of a growing trend, with figure skater Adam Rippon making headlines for wearing a harness to the Oscars last year. While the red carpet has long featured the occasional man willing to wear a ruffly shirt or powder blue tux to an awards show — Daniel Day-Lewis looked like a goth Colonel Sanders when he accepted his Academy Award for My Left Foot in 1990 — the past few years have seen an uptick in male entertainers willing to experiment with fashion.
In particular, the rise of gender-neutral fashion appears to be elevating men’s formalwear, long dismissed as boring since one standard penguin suit is pretty much indistinguishable from the next.
