The Best Red Carpet Looks Of The Ah Fuck It

Florals were definitely the name of the game at Sunday’s Tonys, where Eclipsed star Lupita Nyong’o rocked this off-the-shoulder column dress that you probably don’t actually need narrated for you, right? This is a very pleasant dress to look at, and Lupita’s face is luminous as ever, so some faux-cheerful copy isn’t really going to make the difference, is it? To be completely frank, we’re just not feeling it today.

Yep, as you can see with your eyes, Claire Danes is wearing a very flattering satin gown. True, you might need these little captions to educate you about the fact that the diagonal seams you’re seeing on this dress are the product of what is called a “bias cut,” and that this particular dress was designed by Narciso Rodriquez, but frankly what are you going to do with that information, really? We can only assume that whatever benefit you’d get out of our halfheartedly joking that Danes’ dress was a “bias cut above the rest” is not going to be worth the alienation we feel at writing forced fashion puns when our hearts and minds are elsewhere.

Seriously, it doesn’t take a “style expert” to detect that model Jourdan Dunn is likewise wearing a satin dress, which means that there must have been some kind of satin dress trend going on at the Tony Awards. But even if you do need that pointed out to you, is that really what we all need to be reading about right now? Do we really need to be doing this?

Yeah, Anna Wintour and her daughter, Bee Shaffer, both wore long floral gowns, just like Lupita did. Theirs were slightly different in silhouette from Lupita’s, but we struggle to believe that belaboring the difference between an empire waist and and sheath-style column gown is going to do much to improve our fucked-up world.

We’re not saying that fashion and aesthetics aren’t important, or that the ability to get lost in a series of labored puns about dresses can’t be a helpful form of escapism that makes the reality of right now easier to bear. But the thing is, actual people are writing this stuff. Real people who feel anger and sadness and who need to be able to mourn, just like everybody else. And when the relentless news cycle demands that we continue to trudge right through tragedy with glib takes on the doings of the day, it chips away at the humanity of the people tasked with making culture, which in turn surely degrades the humanity of the culture being made. It has to, right? So aren’t we really doing more harm than good?

Then again, Pascale Armand looked absolutely stunning, and everybody needs to know it.