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Women Dressing Sexy “Doesn’t Mean We Want to F*** You”: Cate Blanchett Wins Style Award and My Heart

Cate Blanchett took home the Style Icon Award award at the InStyle awards last night, where she used her acceptance speech to talk about what styles means to her. Specifically, the actress talked about how we should embrace and promote the way that fashion serves as a means of unapologetic female expression.

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“For me, the true icons of style, and I think there’s a bit of a theme emerging here tonight,” said the goddess-queen Thor: Ragnarok actress, “it’s that for me it’s always those women who’ve been utterly themselves without apology—whose physical presence and their aesthetic is really integrated in a non self-conscious way.”

She went on, “Women who know how they look, it’s not all of who they are but just an extension of that, and it’s about women who feel free to wear what they want when they want and how they want to wear it.” Of course, there’s another dimension to her words about self-consciousness which is that women who dress in ways that might not be seen as “proper” or “conventional” are often targeted for harassment. The phrase “What were you wearing?” is one that many survivors are sadly familiar with, as their clothing is read as some kind of invitation or justification for victim-blaming.

Blanchett demolished the idea that a women’s clothing expresses any kind of invitation, and takes a shot at former Chief Strategist of the White House Steve Bannon at the same time, saying:

“We all like looking sexy but it doesn’t mean we want to fuck you. No one says to Steve Bannon, ‘You look like a bag of trash. Do you want me to throw you out?’ But the comments that get said about what women wear on the red carpet, I mean, if you troll through those trolls on the internet — just don’t.”

(via Instyle, image: StudioCanal)

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