At Cannes 2026, Simone Ashley rewore a gown with a 2011 Met Gala pedigree, Bella Hadid built an entirely archival wardrobe, and Demi Moore wore a dress that was deliberately falling apart.
The Alexander McQueen gown Simone Ashley wore to the Karma premiere at Cannes this month is crimson, from the Fall 2005 collection, sculpted through the bodice with a pleated mermaid skirt that moves like it knows what it’s doing. It has two documented previous owners: Gisele Bündchen wore it to the 2011 Met Gala; it was later photographed on Cate Blanchett for British Vogue. Ashley’s stylist Rebecca Corbin Murray, added Chaumet diamonds for her night on the Croisette. The dress did not require anything else.
At the opening ceremony, Poppy Delevingne wore vintage John Galliano for Dior — a velvet dress with transparent panels and lingerie-inspired detailing, paired with Chopard jewelry. Galliano’s tenure at Dior ran from 1996 to 2011; the pieces from that era are among the most coveted vintage in circulation.
Bella Hadid, marking her 10th year at the festival, arrived in Cannes with a wardrobe drawn largely from the archives. Stylist Mimi Cuttrell pulled a baby blue Prada Sport vest and capri pants from the label’s spring 1999 collection for Hadid’s first appearance on the Croisette — worn with Puma Speedcats and a vintage Prada patent shoulder bag — and kept working from there. An Elie Saab couture piece from spring 2003 appeared one morning outside Hôtel Martinez: sheer floral top, draped scarf, wide-leg white pants. An icy blue Louis Vuitton silk from the same year followed. A two-toned Jean Paul Gaultier linen dress. On a yacht, a pink gingham crop top and matching low-rise co-ord from Chantal Thomass’s spring 1988 collection, sourced by Cuttrell from Justin Reed, an LA-based archival womenswear shop. Then, for the Chopard Miracle Gala, an archival Elie Saab gold sequined gown with the specific density of a piece that was made once and has no interest in being remade.
“In a cycle of constant creative-director turnover and trend fatigue, vintage allows stars to step outside the algorithm and say something original,” Chandler Guttersen, owner of a celebrity-loved vintage shop, told Variety ahead of this year’s awards season. The Cannes red carpet has historically been administered by whichever luxury house negotiates the best deal; a wardrobe built on 1999 Prada Sport and 2003 Elie Saab couture doesn’t require a briefing or a press campaign. It already had a moment.
A dress that has already been made, worn, and photographed into the record requires no new production on its behalf, which puts archival dressing in a category most sustainability conversations in fashion only approximate. The thing exists; someone should be wearing it.
Ashley’s McQueen is a useful case study in why this works at the level of actual spectacle. The dress’s provenance — Bündchen at the Met, Blanchett for Vogue — is part of what makes it land on Ashley’s frame with such force. The gown carries its history visibly, the way very good vintage always does, which is the thing fast fashion has never successfully replicated.
The other gown
Demi Moore, serving on the Cannes jury, wore something considerably stranger to the Paper Tiger premiere. The brand is Matières Fécales — the name translates from French as fecal matter, which functions as both a provocation and a useful filter — an independent label run by Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran, both from Montreal. Dalton grew up in affluent Westmount; Bhaskaran in the working-class Cartierville neighborhood across town.
Their third collection, titled “The One Percent,” was presented at Paris Fashion Week this past March and moves through the codes of extreme wealth — tailoring that constricts and accommodates simultaneously, hand-shredded tweeds, formalwear in deliberate decomposition — with the eye of people who grew up on opposite sides of the same city. The collection was originally conceived 12 years ago, when a fashion school mentor asked Dalton and Bhaskaran to imagine what fashion would look like in 2026. They called the brief “The One Percent.” Two weeks before Moore wore the brand to Cannes, Sarah Paulson had worn a different piece from the same collection to the Met Gala: a gray tulle ball gown paired with white opera gloves and a blindfold made from a one-dollar bill — the look the designers named “Blinded by Money.” A Met Gala ticket costs $100,000. The backlash arrived quickly.
Moore’s gown was hot pink and ball-skirted, with a bow nearly the width of her wingspan, a shredded hem, and tattered silk layered over multiple layers of tulle. “The dress has this slightly decayed effect to it,” Stylist Brad Goreski told reporters, “but then at the same time it was heavily sculpted and had a sweetness. There’s a combination of so many things there that I think she also embodies.” Moore wore it with Matières Fécales x Christian Louboutin bow pumps. Goreski, himself Canadian Moore’s collaborator of nearly 20 years, described the brief: “When Demi and I were brainstorming about Cannes, I just said to her, ‘Look, what I’m really feeling for you right now is like a super colorful, optimistic, vibrant, kind of effervescent presence on the carpet,'” he told reporters. Moore screen-grabbed the pink gown. “I reached out to their PR and was like, please just let this gown be available,” Goreski said, “because that was the one that Demi wanted.”
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