Gwyneth Paltrow’s dress sense is like the music of her husband, Chris Martin: wholesome and well put together but rather, well, bland. She has complained that the British perception of her and Martin as dull is unfair, because “you have to be doing coke off the ass of a stripper to be perceived as not boring these days”. Actually, we’d much prefer sartorial, rather than narcotic, experimentation: clothes that are less MOR and more rock‘n’roll.
She may have won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love but some of Gwynnie’s red-carpet outfits, such as that sugary-pink, Ralph Lauren number in 1999, deserved a fashion Razzie (the alternative awards that take a swipe at the stars). Was the realisation that the dress did nothing for her slender frame and Grace Kelly looks the real reason behind the acceptance-speech tears? Three years later she tried to inject a little gothic edge, but ended up looking like an Upper East Side Avril Lavigne.
However, if she’d teamed that dress with wellies and a pair of wings, she would have fitted in perfectly at Glastonbury last year. Instead she wore a fetching cream pashmina and white camisole that made her look as if she’d just hopped out of Chris Martin’s four-by-four to pick up Apple from nursery, taken a wrong turning and ended up in a field. Her ensemble might look artless, but wearing white to a festival is hardly practical or spontaneous.
You see, Gwynnie is what you could call FID — a fashionista in denial. She’s good friends with Valentino and Stella McCartney, but her pared-down clothes reject all suggestion of vanity in favour of reminding us that she’s a down-to-earth mother more interested in the labels on organic baby food than those in Bergdorf Goodman. However, it’s her hair, even more than her clothes, that suggests she hasn’t abandoned all superficial interests, and we’d be disappointed if she had. It’s a clever double bluff because although it looks unstyled, it may well be her most high-maintenance mane yet.
With her tall, slim figure and refined features, Gwyneth is one of the few women who can wear Stella McCartney’s directional shapes and challenging colours, but the designer’s signature nude and flesh tones do nothing to counteract an insipid image. Her wardrobe is slowly being drained of colour and edge as she’s gone from wearing brights and patterns in her early twenties, through a stylishly minimal black-and-neutrals phase, to ever more washed-out pinks, nudes and whites.
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The cream Balenciaga dress she had specially made for her at the Golden Globes in January made her look almost identical to her character in Emma, but it also highlighted her pregnant radiance and natural beauty. There’s may be nothing rock’n’roll about Jane Austen but hey, at least she’s classic.