A red carpet? No. Gala outfits? No. On Saturday, October 14, celebrity couple Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix hosted a screening of the documentary The Smell of Money at the Laemmle Monica Film Center in Santa Monica, California. Produced by Mara's sister Kate, the film reveals the unsavory underbelly of North Carolina's pork industry.
For the occasion, the two actors didn't pull out all the stops, appearing in clothes that had clearly not been chosen by a stylist, were not subject to any lucrative product placement, or even taken to the cleaners. At a time when celebrities' outfits are all the rage, and often the subject of haggling between brands and agents, let's note the significance of the gesture: Some stars are not for sale at all times.
How could we fail to notice the shoes worn by Phoenix? On his feet were black Converse All-Star low-tops so faded by time and sunlight that they looked gray, reminiscent of one of the most famous pairs of sneakers in history. Kurt Cobain once sported black and gray All-Star low-tops, famously emblazoned with the word "endorsement" on the front of the shoes. The Nirvana singer was denouncing this marketing technique of having a celebrity wear a garment to promote it. Well, well.
That evening, the two actors were dressed entirely in black, but sported white socks. Was this a serious lapse of taste? It's more complicated than that. While there's a powerful and long-lasting stigma attached to wearing white sports socks in France, there's a real tradition of wearing them elsewhere. The garment has traversed many subcultures (punk, mods, teddys) since one day in the 1950s when Gene Kelly decided to make it his fetish accessory. It was a clever trick to draw the spectator's gaze to his footwork.
Mara wore an MA-1 bomber, a nylon jacket introduced by the US Army in the 1950s and regularly worn by pilots ever since. In this case, Mara's was not midnight blue like the original, but black. It was also lined, without a shadow of a doubt, with its iconic orange quilted fabric. Why orange? Because, at the time, it was considered to be the most effective color for locating victims of plane crashes.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.