There’s no denying the Cannes circus is entertaining. Take the headline-making moment Madonna first treated the red carpet to Jean Paul Gaultier’s cone bra in 1991, or the time Milla Jovovich was reportedly sewn back into her beaded loincloth while on The Fifth Element 1997 red carpet. Every instance a woman (see: Julia Roberts, Kristen Stewart, and Jennifer Lawrence) goes barefoot or *gasp!* wears flip-flops, the press goes completely mad, despite the fact we’ve seen it before.
Not so for Venice, which quietly water taxis its guests into town with little fuss and only the faintest whiff of nautical attire to add to the windswept mood. By the time the Italian installment comes around at the end of the summer, there seems to be a visible sigh of relief and a relaxing of the shoulders. There are freckles dotted on actors’ skin (although not if you’re Anne Hathaway!), tales of holidays to tell, and more space for the Hollywoodites to, quite literally, take up. There is no threat of a Kardashian-Jenner derailing the hot-ticket premiere of the week, because LA proper is either still circling the Med (looking at you, Leonardo DiCaprio) or IV-ed up to vitamin drips in Calabasas while resetting their rosé-dinted chakras and talking about their big business plans for September.
Timothée Chalamet, for example, has been known to spritz his way through an afternoon in Venice wearing leather pants, before changing into a red halter-neck Haider Ackermann look on the Bones and All red carpet. That same festival in 2022, Florence Pugh, sorry Miss Flo, also enjoyed an afternoon of Aperol while her Don’t Worry Darling co-stars fumbled their way through an awkward press conference about her absence and the dismissal of Shia LaBeouf from the film set. Pugh’s fashion retort via resplendent custom Valentino couture was one for the books.
