Cannes Film Festival, Julia Roberts laughs in the face of your uptight, strict fashion rules. The actress stepped onto the red carpet at the premiere of Money Monster, the new movie in which she stars with George Clooney directed by Jodie Foster, in a fairly straightforward black gown. The neckline is actually evocative of the famous red dress Roberts wore in Pretty Woman.
When Roberts lifted up the skirt of her Armani Privé gown at Cannes, however, she had a huge surprise waiting underneath. The actress was barefoot. That’s right: Julia Roberts walked a red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival completely barefoot.
This blatant act of fashion rebellion comes just a year after festival organizers allegedly turned away a group of women in their 50s from a screening of Carol for not wearing high heels. “Multiple guests, some older with medical conditions, were denied access to the anticipated world-premiere screening for wearing rhinestone flats,” Screen Daily reported in May 2015.
Screen Daily also noted that festival organizers wouldn’t comment on this specific incident, “but did confirm that it is obligatory for all women to wear high-heels to red-carpet screenings.”
Stars were quick to speak out against the dress-code double standards (cough men ALWAYS get to wear flats cough). “Everyone should wear flats, to be honest. We shouldn’t wear high heels. That’s very disappointing, just when you kind of think there are these new waves of equality,” Emily Blunt said at a press conference for Sicario.
This year, even more actresses are taking a stand against the unequal wardrobe guidelines at the festival. “Things have to change immediately. It has become really obvious that if [a man and I] were walking the red carpet together and someone stopped me and said, ‘Excuse me, young lady, you’re not wearing heels. You cannot come in.’ Then [I’m going to say], ‘Neither is my friend. Does he have to wear heels?’ It can work both ways. It’s just like you simply cannot ask me to do something that you are not asking him. I get the black-tie thing but you should be able to do either version—flats or heels,” Kristen Stewart said at a roundtable for her new film, Café Society.
So how did Julia Roberts manage to evade the stodgy dress code, which technically has yet to change? She did arrive on the red carpet wearing heels, but she appears to have removed them as she made her way into the premiere. Even if she didn’t have to make it past security with bare feet, making it at least part of the way down a Cannes red carpet without shoes is one small step for gender parity in dress codes.
Also, this isn't the first time Roberts has laughed in the face of footwear convention. She famously went barefoot at her 1993 wedding to Lyle Lovett.
