Leslie Jones in red at the Ghostbusters premiere. As expected, after she tweeted her disappointment over not being able to find a designer to dress her, Christian Siriano came through with this custom gown. And Christian Siriano is not a major fashion house. That’s not a knock on him but rather a rebuttal to those stylists and other fashion people who claimed Leslie left it too late for them to be able to come up with an option for her. If Christian Siriano can do it, why can’t multi-million dollar labels? It’s not because they couldn’t. It’s because they didn’t want to. But look at her in this dress. How hard could it have possibly been to find something for Leslie Jones?
And here’s where Christian Siriano deserves acknowledgement. Not for the dress he made her but for refusing to accept that what he did was something special and thereby calling out the problem:
It shouldn't be exceptional to work with brilliant people just because they're not sample size. Congrats aren't in order, a change is.
— Christian Siriano (@CSiriano) June 29, 2016
Don’t give me credit for doing what I’m supposed to do, is what he’s arguing. It’s like complimenting a man as a good father for picking up his kids and feeding them. It’s a basic requirement that comes with the job. He shouldn’t be applauded for meeting the basic requirement of his job. But the fact that that happens all the time tells us something about gender roles in parenting. Just like the fact that Christian has to be congratulated for wanting to dress an actor starring in one of the biggest movies of the summer tells us something about the fashion industry’s (and, to some extent, OUR) arbitrary categorisation of who’s stylish and who isn’t and what those people have to look like in order to make the cut.
The most cliché thing to say about style is that the wearer should love what they’re wearing. And in loving what they’re wearing, they end up wearing the sh-t out of what they’re wearing. To “own it”, if we’re continuing with the clichés. In that spirit, have you ever seen anyone love her dress as much as Leslie loves her dress?
One of the problems with clichés is that it’s easier to recite them than to believe them. I don’t get the sense here that Leslie doesn’t believe that she’s killing it in this dress. There’s not a doubt in her mind that she’s killing it in this dress. It’s a dress that reminds me of a very famous dress. This one:
And then this quote which I wonder Leslie might throw at whoever it was who didn’t want to dress her:
