There was no Oscars dress more talked about last night than Emily Blunt’s floating underwear-themed number. It was pretty, true, but it was also pretty weird. Everyone was confused about those straps. Were they supposed to be floating off her shoulders like that?
Yes, they were (and Florence Pugh also had a floating-straps dress, hers created by Del Core) but the effect might not have been what Blunt and her stylists had hoped. When Blunt was seated, especially, many viewers thought the way the straps rose up looked less deliberate and more like what you would see from an ill-fitting dress no one had bothered sitting down in. There were, of course, immediately memes making fun of it.
The dress was a Schiaparelli number and it was, as you can see, very divisive. Blunt made it onto several best-dressed lists, and the New York Times called the effect “jolting,” though it’s not clear if that was meant to be complimentary or not. (And that’s not even getting into the glittering Y-fronts design.)
“All we can think is that she must have figured she wasn’t going to win, so she chose to wear something everyone would wind up taking about,” wrote Cosmopolitan, neatly summing it up. But now, Blunt’s stylist has waded into the hot-or-not discussion.
What does Blunt’s stylist Jessica Paster have to say?
Jessica Paster spoke to Vanity Fair as the dust was still settling on the Oscars. She revealed that the underwear embellishment had been renamed “the Emily” by Schiaparelli, and that the actress and the fashion house knew full well that eyebrows would be raised at the floating straps.
“Sometimes we don’t play it safe. At this point of years of being with Emily, we can go have fun with fashion,” she told the outlet. She hadn’t expected Florence Pugh to wear something equally fun, though. She said, “I thought [Blunt] was gonna be the first one to wear it … and then I saw that the beautiful Florence Pugh also had a very similar shoulder.” But seemingly there’s no hard feelings. (And Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh are in the same Oppenheimer family, so … )
Paster also doesn’t actually care that the dress is controversial. “Did I know that people were going to talk about the shoulder? Absolutely. Do I care what anybody else has to say? Absolutely not,” she told Vanity Fair. “Me? I think that people that know fashion, like fashion, like things that are interesting, were going to like it and I know the people that like some things that are very classic were not going to like it. At the end of the day, she looked absolutely beautiful. It was such a beautiful dress.”
She’s not wrong. The embellished underwear detail is still a little weird, though. Sorry.
(featured image: John Shearer/WireImage)
