Photo by David Fisher/REX/Shutterstock

Shocking Pink Ruled the Red Carpet at the 91st Academy Awards

Our picks for 'best dressed' at the 2019 Oscars are as follows...

Date February 24, 2019

I’m going to say it: awards show red carpets are extremely boring. While I’m hardly immune to feeling starry-eyed over throwback footage of beautiful celebrities like Cindy Crawford, Richard Gere and Jack Nicholson arriving at the 1999 Oscars, it’s hard to reconcile such peerless glamour with the snoozy occasion the Academy Awards have become. Viewership is down, the red carpet outfits are overstyled and safe to a fault, and the actual movies everyone is there to laud are boring. Frankly, the entire spectacle has never felt less relevant to the culture at large.

That said, this evening’s red carpet did manage to pull off some exciting surprises, namely the ubiquity of shocking pink dresses. The colour heavily associated with Barbie Dolls, Angelyne, and Paris Hilton in the early 2000s made an unannounced comeback. Leading ladies Sarah Paulson, Gemma Chan, Linda Cardellini, Helen Mirren, and Maya Rudolph all showed up shades of fuschia that wouldn’t look out of place on Killing Eve‘s hyper-femme assassin, Villanelle.

Perhaps the singularly most exciting outfit of the evening was Billy Porter‘s Christian Siriano tuxedo dress, which was as much a political statement as it was a good outfit, followed by Linda Cardellini in a completely bonkers fuschia tulle number by Schiaparelli Couture. I actually let out a small yelp after fully registering how freaking incredible Cardellini looks in this dress. (For all the Freaks and Geeks superfans reading this: Lindsay Weir really had a glow-up, huh?) The most unexpected appearance of the night was elfin tidying guru Marie Kondo in a petal-pink Jenny Packham gown. It totally beats me why someone best known for devising their own method of folding socks is walking the Oscars red carpet, but her presence certainly livened up the place a bit.

Read on for our picks of who snagged ‘best-dressed’ on the 2019 Oscars red carpet.