Rarely am I stunned by the things celebrities wear to awards shows. I am impressed, and more often than not, mildly amused, even bored. But ever more fleeting is a feeling of genuine shock, even surprise. Let me personally thank Chappell Roan, then, for reminding me what it feels like to be alive.
Pop’s supernova arrived on the Grammy’s red carpet in an explosion of red curls. The hair has become a signature for Roan, defining a look she and creative collaborator Genesis Webb have carved out on the surface of the earth. (They say it can even be seen from space.) Alongside the waist length tresses and graphic makeup was a cascade of sheer maroon that clung to her like skin sloughing off a witch.
It’s so immediately iconographic, I couldn’t publish it on the front page of this website. Not because PAPER adheres to sexist double standards applied to women who make art, or even because we’re prudes. Mostly, as senior editor, I was worried that the powers that be might penalize us for reasons that will become extremely obvious the second everyone scrolls past this sentence.
The PAPER cover star and her stylist Webb, also a PAPER star, created something so spectacular together, we didn’t even have to show our readers it at all. I can confidently say most of you have already seen it. I can also confidently say most of you will continue to see it for the rest of yourselves, so swiftly has it secured a place for itself in the highest echelons of red carpet moments ever, let alone the 21st century.
Did we mention it’s custom Mugler, referencing the 1998 dress of the same make?
Beyond the shock of her breasts, the dress works for numerous reasons. Across her body, makeup artist Andrew Dahling has stamped medieval inspired tattoos that read like arcane runes, bolstering the overall effect of a woman defying her turn at the burning stake. That it melts so seamlessly into the color of her hair is likewise an excellent choice, and that’s all before we arrive at the prosthetic nipple piercings Dahling has created to aid the draping of it across her waist.
It’s through those prosthetic nipple piercings that the dress completely defies any expectation of the red carpet sheer look. A staple of the 2020s, sheer mesh dresses, proliferated by houses like Mugler, have grown stale, almost expected, of pop stars. Show some curves, grab a few headlines, hope Kim Kardashian doesn’t also show up in something sheer. Then the dresses are redesigned for mass market, worn dozens of times across various Real Housewives franchises, and ultimately wind up in Nordstrom Rack while fashion editors beg for literally anything else, even the Rick Owens prong dress, to make a hasty return.
What these piercings do is inject the sheer dress with a much needed element of friction. The original shock value of showing up completely exposed on the carpet was for that very fact: nudity in a misogynistic culture that both sensationalized and shunned the exposed female form. Society has largely not changed; women on the Grammys stage industry are judged for their bodies and looks alongside their artistic output. But collectively, paparazzi have grown used to the parade of sheer moments. If they sell lookalikes at Target that people will wear to an office mixer, where’s the shock in Kim Kardashian’s nearly nude figure?
It’s been over a decade she broke the internet in PAPER, after all.
Back to Chappell Roan. The friction in this dress comes from how abrasive the fake nipples and piercings are, both holding up the dress and lending her form an otherworldly, almost post-human quality. Despite being a relatively simple slip of maroon fabric, the tension in the manner of draping is unlike most nude-moments red carpet critics have grown accustomed to in the last decade.
Allusions to the once great looks of her predecessor, Lady Gaga, feel trite at this stage in Roan’s career. But the Alexander McQueen fall 1998 lace dress with the crown and face mask did immediately come to mind, having first laid eyes on Roan tonight. Immediately following her career defining performance of “Paparazzi,” fake blood still matted into her hair, Gaga slipped into a costume that all but erased her. She appeared as if an automaton, beyond human, beyond what pop culture could conceive of.
The echoes of it carry across time, to Roan and tonight’s red carpet. I am overwhelmed with the tantalizing, grotesque possibilities of clothing draped with piercings and body modifications. Dresses grown out of our bodies, shoes and heels embedded into them. What was it Lady Gaga said, all those years ago? “It’s so magical/ We’d be so fantastical
