Gwyneth Paltrow was out for dinner last night at Mr Chow in Beverly Hills with family members, including Brad Falchuk and her son Moses, and also a group of friends. 

 

This is a classic GP dinner outfit – black low-cut tank over white belted wide-leg trousers, and sneakers. She looks chic and comfortable and rich. 

Gwyneth Paltrow at dinner
Gwyneth Paltrow at dinner

And of course this has been one of the big fashion trends of the season: quiet luxury, we saw it on Succession and, naturally, Gwyneth was one of the earliest adopters of it in real life, as we saw during her ski crash trial this past winter. 

 

Quiet luxury on Succession is a way that the Roy family asserted its superiority. They’re too rich to wear anything with a logo on it. They’re so rich they don’t need to wear their wealth. Or, rather, the way they wear their wealth is by not flaunting anything overtly brand name; real money is in the finer details – if you know, you know. 

There are those who don’t have Waystar Royco money who prefer this aesthetic. And for the most part, whatever, taste is taste. That said, the undercurrent in the quiet luxury style choice for people like the Roys – and the statement that the show and its costume designers were making about those assholes (because let’s not forget, they were satirising these characters that they created) – is that they considered those who did the opposite of quiet luxury, in other words loud luxury, with Gucci double-Gs and Chanel double-Cs, and LVs all over the place, to be below them. In our culture, think about who we see wearing their clothes that way, what they look like, where they’re from. Is it classist? Obviously. That’s why Gwyneth Paltrow is the perfect f-cking model for it. 

 

Is it quiet luxury also to let your roots come in? Most people I know who colour their hair to cover greys never miss their root appointments. And if for whatever reason they can’t keep it to schedule, they have ways to bridge the gap – hair mascara, home kits, etc. I work in television, trust me I’ve seen all the tricks. And these tricks are employed because women on television are judged much more harshly than their male counterparts. How often do we see female television presenters with grey hair compared to male television anchors with grey hair? It’s not even close to a 1:1 ratio. 

 

GP, however, as you can see here, has apparently let her roots come in for the summer. I’m not here to criticise her for it because it’s not a bad thing, to see more female celebrities let their grey in. That said, even as such a public-facing person and within her own Hollywood co-hort, she is in a privileged enough position so that it won’t necessarily hurt her. 

Gwyneth in her grey era is pure Town & Country. The lady at the country club who pulls up with a sweater wrapped around her shoulders and automatically gets the best table for her lunch date. Gwyneth’s shade of grey might as well be called Downton Abbey grey, it goes well with pearls, and for people like her, being able to go out grey in and of itself is a statement of wealth and class.