At 2018 Billboard Awards Red Carpet Ms. McNeill was talking about success in the music world and how to achieve it, but she could also have been talking about the look of the evening. If the Academy Awards red carpet has become a polished marketing event with celebrities as pawns in a high-fashion game, the pink version at the Billboard awards revealed rock stars and those who aspire to be them dressed, well, seemingly by themselves.
Sure, there were big brand names on display, but aside from a select few (Versace, as worn by Priyanka Chopra and Ariana Grande, springs to mind) they were pretty much unrecognizable. When even Heidi Klum could not remember the name of the emerging designer who had made her dress (“But it’s a new designer, and I love him,” she said), it was clear this was going to be less about a runway aesthetic than a Vegas aesthetic.
Which could be summed up as: legs. Also spangles, and side cutouts. Mostly on the co-host Ciara, who started the evening in a silver Philipp Plein tabard dress held together on the sides by tiny strips at the hip, and then slipped into six — count ’em — other looks during the course of the evening, all of which revealed various body parts in unexpected ways. She has just signed with IMG Models, so perhaps she was displaying her versatility.
Still, Ciara looked positively subdued compared with Britney Spears, who set the tone for the night (well, the awards were in her current hometown) in a sheer lace romper over black undies with a long train and knee-high fishnet boots, which resembled nothing so much as Frederick’s of Hollywood meets “Game of Thrones,” though it was apparently by Reem Acra.
And so it went from there. Demi Lovato wore a sheer lace top over a black bra under a bouclé jacket and wide black trousers by Chanel before changing into a sheer T-shirt, big pants and over-the-knee boots for her performance. Zendaya wore a flesh-colored bra with a matching long skirt that made her look like a Calvin Klein mermaid. Keke Palmer was in burgundy latex (“I’m sweating from the inside,” she said). Gwen Stefani wore a transparent gown with strategically placed silver sequins for her duet with Blake Shelton that called to mind Beyoncé’s little-left-to-the-imagination Met Gala dress of 2017.
Of course, we’ve been there, done that. The naked look is, in many ways, so last year. A display of lingerie is no longer shocking, which may be why Rihanna, high priestess of the peekaboo, made the most shocking appearance of the evening — in a covered-up bronze vintage Thierry Mugler coatdress.
She changed into a black trouser suit with a mint-green fur shoulder wrap to sing, and, after that, a green-and-black tiger-striped Dries Van Noten nightie dress to receive her Chart Achievement award. But they were all relatively sedate (even the nightie dress was long and not clingy.)
The net effect was to make Rihanna look like a grown-up, an adjective that also applied to Adele, who wore a long-sleeved flower-festooned gown (which was the source of much Twitter speculation, though it turned out to be by Dolce & Gabbana) in her new video, which had its premiere during the awards. Even Madonna, who has of late displayed a pointedly non-age-appropriate tendency to excessive exposure, chose to wear a baroque purple pantsuit by Gucci in her tribute to Prince (coincidentally, purple trousers were also Kesha’s choice for the red carpet).