Alexander McQueen SS25 Collection. Daniele Oberrauch / Gorunway.com
As any editorial stylists out there will know—and if you aren’t one, now you do!—full-look policies are kind of a thing in fashion. When you request a piece from a brand for a shoot, they’ll often only lend it on the condition that it’s photographed in the same styled context as it was first seen on the runway. As the 2025 Golden Globes demonstrated, however, the same rules don’t really apply on the red carpet.
Indeed, last night saw two of the most memorable looks of the spring/summer 2025 collections make their first—though probably not last—appearances of awards season. The Brutalist’s Felicity Jones wore a customized adaptation of that Prada dress, the mega-blinged, mirror-encrusted shift dress that was look 45. Elsewhere, Angelina Jolie sported the finale look from Seán McGirr’s sophomore collection for McQueen, an exquisite entanglement of precision-embroidered silvered cords that required hours of handcraft to create.
They were two irrefutable highlights amid a parade of generally strong fashion—and testament to Vogue Business’s José Criales-Unzueta’s observations on the shifting function of the red carpet into a de facto new season catwalk. And while I can’t quite say that I was left wanting by the looks, it did leave me thinking about the potential that could have been unlocked had either woman opted to sport the full look as seen on the runway.
In the case of the Prada dress, it was originally styled under a rubber-duck-hued cagoule—“the sort that, if they weren’t Prada you’d imagine came folded into a pocket-sized pouch,” as I described it in an earlier piece—intended as a protest against algorithmic dressing and a celebration of “human intervention, invention and choice,” said Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons. With the McQueen moment, the original piece came with a bedraggled, fringed hood, crystals strewn across the model’s face as if she’d emerged from a shimmering bog—which, within the show’s narrative, she had, with the look a nod to the significance character of the banshee within both Irish mythology and the house’s universe.
Now, there are obvious practical reasons why the two stars’ stylists may have chosen to swerve the original creative intentions—a face-obscuring hood, after all, isn’t exactly a great option for a photo call, especially when you have a face like Angelina Jolie’s. And moreover, customizing looks for the red carpet is, well, custom.
Still, as the worlds of fashion and entertainment continue to merge to the point of being indistinguishable from one another, there’s something to be said for the opportunity the sort of directional styling choices seen during fashion week could offer on Hollywood’s biggest occasions. After all, if life is a fashion show and the world is a runway, the place where that really applies is the red carpet.
Of course, fashion should never be dictated, and reinvention and play are crucial aspects for its progression. But when the conceptual gravitas and sheer fashion clout of looks are so strong, it almost feels like a missed trick not to give them their full moment to shine—in these cases, very literally—on one of culture’s highest stages. This is all to say, this is the moment for someone to step up and wear Prada spring/summer 2025 look 26 to the Oscars in full. Please and thank you!
This article was originally published on British Vogue.
