Venice Dressed First: Dior Claimed the Lido

The Venice Film Festival is not a red carpet. It never really was. It is a negotiation — between the film being sold and the person selling it, between the character an actor has just inhabited and the one they're about to construct for the cameras. The clothes are the opening bid. And this season, one house placed its chips down so early and so completely that the conversation was over before it began.

Dior was everywhere on the Lido. Ever Anderson, twenty-one and making her Venice debut, wore it with the specific confidence of someone who has spent enough time around costume departments to understand that dressing is always a decision about character. She wanted "fun and flashy" — and she got it, paired with vintage, which is the move of someone who already knows that newness alone is never enough. Priyanka Chopra and Jennifer Lawrence coordinated in matching little black Dior looks in Paris, the kind of twinning that looks accidental in photographs and was absolutely not. Robert Pattinson arrived in Dior Homme — the suits that understand restraint is its own kind of theatre — while Suki Waterhouse stood next to him in glittery Saint Laurent, which is the correct choice if your partner is wearing quiet and you have decided not to.

The contrast between Pattinson and Waterhouse is the whole story of couples dressing told in one frame: two people at the same event, in the same moment, making completely different arguments about what the night is for. Neither is wrong. That tension is exactly what makes it interesting.

Meanwhile, Kendall Jenner — who seems to be having a very good month sartorially — turned up at Venice in artist-made earrings referencing Peggy Guggenheim, which is either very researched or very well-advised, and either way lands correctly. Guggenheim understood that collecting was a performance and that the body was an extension of the collection. Jenner understands this too, even if the vocabulary is different.

The more interesting footnote: Sofia Richie Grainge borrowing Kendall Jenner's vintage Chanel Cruise dress from 2014 for a wedding weekend. A twelve-year-old piece, passed between two women who move at the front of fashion — this is what the conversation looks like when it stops being about newness and starts being about meaning. The dress was never just a dress. It was always a reference.

Fashion at film festivals has always been about what you're willing to say before you say anything. Venice, this season, said Dior. Everything else was punctuation.