Joaquin Phoenix Is Just Wearing This Tux for Awards Season to “Reduce Waste”
The red carpet is perhaps one of the least sustainable elements of the fashion world: home to items worn once and then never again. Couture gowns and custom suits that take hours to produce have the lifespan of your average fast-fashion getup. Even the seemingly immortal red carpet itself isn’t meant to last: the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced that this year it plans to reuse the carpet at other events for the first time. (So...what did they do with it before?)
Stella McCartney and Joaquin Phoenix have devised a clever way around the problem: to “reduce waste,” Phoenix will wear the same Stella McCartney tuxedo for all of awards season, per the designer’s Twitter account. The campaign kicked off at last night’s Golden Globes, where Phoenix took home the award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama, for Joker. McCartney has been fashion’s leading voice in sustainable design since she launched her brand in 2001, working with vegan animal skins and tasking partners like Adidas with creating smart fabrics out of recyclable materials. What seemed like a personal passion now seems remarkably prescient, with other fashion brands scurrying to emulate her efforts.
Phoenix, similarly, is a leading voice in animal rights and environmental issues—he’s a lifelong vegan, executive produced a documentary, The Animal People, last year, and is often seen at climate crisis and PETA protests.
Phoenix’s tux is pretty classic as far as men’s red carpet looks go—in fact, its asceticism almost stood out at an unusually fashionable Golden Globes ceremony. Knowing McCartney, there’s no doubt the suit was made with the most sustainable labor practices possible, and getting multiple wears out of the same tuxedo is a strong counter to the relentless churn of red carpet outfits, which can be exhausting for the wearer and observer alike. (Then again, most men, non-celebrity division, wear the same tuxedo their entire lives!) Phoenix will save a bunch of time and money otherwise spent attending fittings and stylist meetings—it must be strangely liberating to realize you don’t have to pick out an outfit for a red carpet appearance for the next several months. (Admittedly, if there were no sustainability tie-in, wearing the same tuxedo over and over still seems like a very I’m Still Here-era Phoenix stunt. “Is this guy okay? He’s been in that tux for weeks!”)
The one-tux trick might not be feasible for Hollywood’s bolder clotheshorses, though the idea of wearing clothing that is part of your wardrobe, and therefore likely to be repeated, is good for the planet and good for style. Sustainable fashion is one of those buzzy concepts that seems to get harder to define the more we learn about it, but part of that uncertainty means that smart people are coming up with new ideas all the time. Like the best and most elegant concepts in sustainable fashion, we probably wouldn’t have even noticed if McCartney hadn’t announced it. Now let’s see how a fashion icon like Timothée Chalamet or Shia LaBeouf might try to outdo him.
Originally Appeared on GQ
