Naked Ambition Meets Its Match at Cannes

The festival’s clampdown on nudity and spectacle has left stylists scrambling and luxury brands rethinking red carpet strategy, revealing fresh tensions in the theatre of celebrity.

"Zoe Saldaña arrives at Cannes 2025 in a pared-back black gown, reflecting the new dress code mood. Credit: Getty Images"

For the better part of a century, the Cannes Film Festival has been a cinematic, social, and sartorial theatre of excess.

Each year, the Croisette becomes a temporary capital of high fashion, where tradition and transgression get to lock eyes in the blinding flash of the world’s cameras. But on the eve of this year’s festival, with stylists steaming Gaurav Gupta and Simone Rocha gowns in hotels up and down the Riviera, the organisers quietly rewrote the script.

Effective immediately: nudity and sheer “naked dresses” are banned, “for reasons of decency.” Out, too, are extravagant trains and voluminous silhouettes, supposedly to streamline guest movement and keep the Grand Théâtre’s velvet aisles clear. Footwear, at least, is less policed than in previous years: flat sandals are now allowed, softening a long-criticised rule that once saw women turned away for wearing anything but heels. The new guidance landed, quietly but unmistakably, as a correction; a recalibration of who gets to set the boundaries on the world’s most famous red carpet.

Left: Sophia Loren at Cannes in the 1950s, epitomising old-school glamour in a voluminous ballgown. Source: Getty Images. Right: Bella Hadid in Saint Laurent’s viral naked dress, Cannes 2021. Source: Getty Images

What changed, exactly, and why now? For some, it’s a practical intervention, aimed at taming the chaos of a red carpet that, in recent years, has become as much about the viral shock of a look as the films themselves. The spectacle has escalated, both in silhouette and in skin. Bella Hadid’s see-through Saint Laurent, Rihanna’s parade of barely-there gowns, Bianca Censori’s engineered nakedness at the Grammys; these moments ricochet across feeds before the festival even opens its doors, outpacing the movies they’re meant to celebrate. Cannes’ new policy, then, could be read as an attempt to regain some semblance of order; to remind the world that this is still cinema’s oldest, most self-conscious ritual.

But reading this purely as a logistical clampdown flattens what’s really at stake. The red carpet is a proxy war for arguments about gender, agency, and spectacle. The “naked” trend, once a calculated provocation and reliable traffic-driver for the Getty wire, has become a measuring stick for how much control institutions still hold over celebrity image-making. Dressing a client at Cannes involves navigating both fashion choices and the festival's expectations; in an era where every hemline is a headline, who gets to set the terms is the real question.

Cannes is no stranger to this particular brand of cultural brinkmanship. The festival’s visual grammar runs on rules constantly rewritten; some posted at the entrance, others enforced by PRs and policed by sponsors. Since 1946, black tie has remained fixed, yet the expectation that women should arrive in heels and gowns has proved less stable. Each challenge (Kristen Stewart’s barefoot protest, Julia Roberts turning up barefoot in Chopard jewels, Madonna’s cone bra moment) shows just how fragile these codes become under modern scrutiny. For brands like Chopard and L’Oréal, both official festival partners, the red carpet is a high-stakes stage where visibility feeds directly into brand value.

Left: Bianca Censori’s engineered nakedness on the red carpet, Grammys 2024. Source: Getty Images Right: Rihanna makes headlines in a crystal-embellished naked dress at the CFDA Fashion Awards, 2014. Source: Getty Images

If the naked dress was the red carpet’s post-pandemic supernova (embodied in the latex minimalism of Coperni, the frosted organza of Miu Miu, the surgically placed rhinestones of Ludovic de Saint Sernin) then this year’s edict signals a return to something more tightly policed. Organisers cite “decency,” but the term is slippery. Cannes has long traded on a kind of sanctioned transgression, celebrating art that pushes at social taboos while policing the bodies on its carpets.

The double standard is glaring: films that win the Palme d’Or regularly feature nudity and sexual content, yet stars are now instructed to cover up in the name of propriety. Halle Berry, a jury member, found herself in the middle of the maelstrom, forced to swap a Gaurav Gupta train for a streamlined Jacquemus. Her response was diplomatic, publicly supporting the nudity ban, even as the internet parsed the logic of whose nakedness is allowed, and where.

"Gigi Hadid in a classic, lined black gown on the Cannes 2025 red carpet. Credit: Getty Images"

Beneath the scramble for new looks and the last-minute sartorial pivots, the industry's reaction has been mixed. Stylists accustomed to creative freedom are now working within stricter constraints, adapting to a Cannes red carpet shaped by clearly defined rules. Celebrity stylist Karla Welch publicly criticised the new dress code, describing it as "boring and patriarchal" on Instagram, reflecting broader frustration among fashion insiders. Meanwhile, luxury brands, who traditionally rely on dramatic and attention-grabbing ensembles to secure media attention, must reconsider how to navigate this more modest landscape, where visibility may increasingly depend on subtler expressions of glamour.

High-wattage jewellery meets modest styling as brands like Chopard adapt to new codes, Cannes 2025. Credit: Getty Images

Behind the scenes, brand partners and publicists are facing practical headaches. Chopard, a long-time Cannes sponsor, invests heavily in jewellery placements dependent on exposed skin and dramatic silhouettes; a sudden turn towards lined gowns and covered necklines leaves PR teams scrambling to rethink placements. Even L’Oréal, the festival’s official beauty partner, has had to adjust campaigns, shifting from high-impact red carpet moments towards more restrained close-ups and interviews. In this new landscape, the economics of the red carpet feel unpredictable, subtly altering the hierarchy of visibility.

So far, the 2025 festival’s arrivals have felt visually, if not energetically, more subdued. Lined gowns, skirt suits, and near-monastic silhouettes have replaced the fever-dream bareness of recent years. The mood is neither nostalgic nor defiant. Instead, there’s a sense of watchfulness; stars and stylists alike are testing the new parameters of visibility.

Left: Julia Roberts walks barefoot on the Cannes red carpet in Chopard jewels, 2016. Source: Getty Images Right: Kristen Stewart removes her heels in protest of the festival’s footwear policy, Cannes 2018. Source: Getty Images

Are we nearing the end of red carpet rebellion or merely its latest battleground? The spectacle, after all, has always been a negotiation between risk and reward, visibility and propriety, agency and control. Every policy change at Cannes has sparked pushback, sometimes quietly, sometimes as a global meme. Today, with viral moments measured in views rather than column inches, the power to define glamour feels more distributed, yet still, in crucial ways, up for grabs.

And if the past seventy years are anything to go by, the story of who gets to define glamour, at Cannes, or anywhere else, is still wide open, hemline rules notwithstanding.