Why yes, I did like that dress. I’m not sure it would work if she weren’t pregnant, and I guess it’s also pretty literal in the sense that yeah, she’s in bloom. But if the worst criticism of an outfit is that it’s literal, well, then by all accounts she’s doing well.
But Chrissy Teigen isn’t merely a fashion story here. Chrissy Teigen is a wonderfully unharnessed, free-off-the-draw unpredictable person whose Twitter is delightfully uncurated and whose awards show reactions are the stuff of legend. Tonight she made this face when Stacey Dash appeared onstage:
Let’s just unpack this, because there are a lot of people who didn’t get the joke when Stacey Dash came out onstage, and other people who said they understood part of it, but…wasn’t there more?
Here it is, in basic:
Stacey Dash is an actress who mostly is famous for playing Dionne from Clueless in whatever form she can. She’s been around more lately because she’s had a job as a commentator on Fox News for the past couple of years, and she says incendiary things, because it’s Fox News. (I enjoyed when she called the wage gap “an excuse” for women not to work hard enough.) Recently she said she thought that Black History Month and BET should be abolished and made many people angry amid a really convoluted metaphor about breadcrumbs. She’s widely understood to be the worst.
Ergo, by bringing Stacey Dash to the Oscars as alleged Director of Diversity Outreach…I don’t know exactly.
Either Stacey Dash is self-aware enough to poke fun at herself (not a chance), or there’s an ironic joke somewhere in someone who is so against any diversity representation bringing a part of the representation herself, or—and this is what strikes me as the most likely conclusion—Chris Rock or whomever asked her took a bet that her need to promote herself would supersede her desire not to support any diversity initiatives, and turned out to be very, very right. Either way, the moment didn’t so much land as kind of teeter on its side, with nobody understanding exactly what she was supposed to be or represent.
All of which brings us back to Chrissy Teigen’s glorious reaction face. Which is really a gift.
