The hot pink Tom Ford breastplate, which costs the same as half of a fairly spruced up Honda Accord, might have felt fresher if not for the very poor timing of it having just been worn by Gwyneth Paltrow for her Harper’s Bazaar cover. It is hard to know how I would have felt about this otherwise. It is, objectively, batty. It’s the female equivalent of when men were wearing the Louis Vuitton harnesses, or close to it. It’s not a shirt; it’s a mold, as if turning this woman’s body into a mannequin in a much more literal way, which I don’t enjoy, and the skirt under these lights looks cheap (the runway’s setup lit it better). Zendaya is cool to her very core, and can pull off almost any amount of nonsense, so maybe if I’d come at this fresh we’d be having a different conversation. But I’m biased now, I think, because Gwyneth already strapped it on to climb up onto Mount Goop and tell us how traumatic it is to have the reputation she has, while also continuing unapologetically to do all the things for which she has earned that reputation. We always like to say, every outfit has its context, and that does matter. The problem is, sometimes that context includes how or where it was worn before. Zendaya may be a fitting context for this, but by an accident of timing, we’d already talked about it on Gwyneth and for me that makes it harder to gauge its freshness here. I do stand by not liking the skirt with it, though. I wonder how it would’ve been with a black high-waisted wide-legged pant, removing the notion of even TRYING to color-match?

Critics’ Choice Awards 2019

Then again… at the end of the day, it’s a cross between a dickie and a five-point harness. Was I ever going to love this?

[Photos: WENN]