The red carpet didn’t exactly return. But fashion did.
It wasn’t your usual awards show red carpet. There wasn’t, after all, a red carpet. Instead there were nominees and performers and presenters beamed in from their living rooms or movie-magicked sets.
But at the 20th annual BET Awards on Sunday night — for the first time since Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic, and gatherings went virtual and most such events, from the Met Gala to the Cannes Film Festival, were canceled — the people involved (including the host Amanda Seales, against a green screen in her home, Lizzo, Jennifer Hudson and Beyoncé) dressed up for public consumption.
And it was excellent to see.
Not all that long ago, awards shows and pay-to-wear deals had seemed ubiquitous; the celebs like walking high-fashion ads. Then recent televised charity concerts featured artists in their homes wearing T-shirts and sweats to prove they are Just Like Us and suffer the same alienation and disassociation of lockdown. In contrast, the BET Awards may mark the start of a new stage: one in which fashion returns not as marketing tool, but as a statement of personal intent.
No one on Sunday night was asked, “What are you wearing?” No one name-checked a brand (save, sometimes, on Instagram). But the clothes, and the effort involved, still mattered. With what they wore, the artists at the BET Awards honored the occasion, and one another.
“Our culture can’t be canceled” went the tag line for the show. The fashion just amplified that shout into the void.
It started even before the preshow, with Amanda Seales, the comedian who served as host, posting a picture on Instagram of herself in a tiny ruffled red leather minidress — her “red carpet” entrance look — by Khala Whitney, the designer behind Grayscale. It was the first of what Byron Javar, Ms. Seales’ stylist, revealed would be 13 — count ’em — different changes, all from black fashion, jewelry and shoe brands.
