At the Met Gala on May 5, Halle Berry wore a dress that showed off slivers of skin and featured a dramatic train — so it isn’t a shock that her planned Cannes wardrobe was among the first to be affected by the film festival’s new dress code. “I had an amazing dress by Gupta that I can’t wear tonight, because it’s too big of a train,” Berry, who is on the festival’s jury this year, said at a Cannes press conference on May 13. “Of course I’m going to follow the rules. But I had to make a pivot.” The new Cannes dress code bans nudity on the red carpet and at the festival “for decency reasons” and states that “voluminous outfits, in particular those with a large train, that hinder the proper flow of traffic of guests and complicate seating in the theater, are not permitted,” per the official Cannes charter. To enforce these rules, the festival’s “welcoming teams” will not allow anyone on the carpet who does not follow the code.
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In practice, the rule seems up to interpretation. Heidi Klum’s May 13 floral dress has a ginormous train, and she was permitted to walk the carpet. The new rule regarding nudity comes on the heels of Bella Hadid’s 2024 Cannes outfit designed by Saint Laurent, which was entirely sheer. As for “voluminous outfits” at Cannes, there have been countless — from Fan Bing Bing in 2023 to Coco Rocha and Uma Thurman in 2024, all which would now be banned on the Riviera. However, Cannes dress codes have been broken. In 2018, Kristen Stewart took off her high heels on the red carpet in defiance of a technically unofficial Cannes requirement that women wear heels, per Vogue. And in 2016, Julia Roberts went barefoot to protest the rule. France (motherland of Christian Louboutin) and America (motherland of Toms) fighting over foot comfort tracks. But it is a great sadness for the French, of all people, to reject nudity.
