Brad Pitt Wanted to 'Mess It Up' With His Skirt on the Red Carpet
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Brad Pitt confused some people at the Berlin premiere of his new movie Bullet Train when he took to the red carpet not in the traditional suit or tux, but an untucked shirt and skirt. While shabby chic is definitely an aesthetic that has come to be associated with the actor (he took the "ruggedly handsome" crown from Robert Redford and has been running with it ever since), tabloids couldn't get over the fact he had shown his knees.
Pitt joked at the time that he wore the skirt because of "the breeze," but faced further questioning about the look at the L.A. premiere this week.
“I don’t know!" he said, when asked by Variety reporter Marc Malkin about his recent sartorial choices. "We're all going to die, so let's mess it up."
Pitt has a point: life is way too short to not express yourself and wear the clothes you like. But the mere fact that his outfit made the news, and that I am writing about it again here, speaks to a wider cultural phenomenon.
It has almost become a cliche at this point that straight, cisgender men will be publicly lauded for "defying" gender norms by wearing feminine-coded apparel, jewelry, and nail polish. TikTok influencers like Noah Beck come to mind. However, it could be said that these accoutrements are deployed disingenuously as a means of actually accentuating their masculinity rather than expressing femininity. (Look at me! I'm so confident in my manliness that I can wear this girly stuff without seeming weak!)
Not to mention that for every male celebrity who is photographed in a pearl necklace and plaid skirt, there are trans and gender-nonconforming people out in the world who not only miss out on that same approval, but actually face discrimination and violence for existing outside of the gender binary.
Of course, just because an outfit blurs gender lines doesn't necessarily make it good or stylish. In fact, once you start looking past the praise that some of these guys receive for daring to put on a frock, you'll see comments from fashion experts critiquing their efforts. Pitt's skirt made headlines for sure, but one of the main reasons those images from the premiere circulated so widely on Twitter was because people couldn't believe how secondhand the whole thing looked.
Similarly, musicians like Harry Styles and Kid Cudi have performed and been photographed in dresses, paying homage to the likes of David Bowie and Kurt Cobain before them—but sometimes the end result has been ill-fitting or poorly styled.
Put simply: where's the effort? Perhaps what it will take for a famous cishet man to really break down those pesky gender norms is to actually give female fashion the attention and consideration it deserves when putting together an attention-grabbing outfit, instead of assuming that a skirt by its very nature fulfils the brief.
Your clothing can transcend the binary, but you still need to pass the fit check.
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