Hello, Open Thread. Happy first day of spring. For those celebrating, Eid Mubarak. Hope everyone had a good Oscar night. Personally, the look I can’t get out of my head belonged to Chloé Zhao, the director of “Hamnet.” (That’s her, above.) I can’t remember the last time a director actually made any kind of statement on the red carpet, but Ms. Zhao has embraced fashion in a really notable way. To find out why, I had a quick chat with her stylist, Deborah Afshani. It turned out this was Ms. Afshani’s first awards season, too. (Normally she works for magazines or on ad campaigns.) Here’s what she told me: How did you and Zhao work together? This was a time of transformation for her, and when Chloé and I first connected in December 2025, she shared ideas, imagery, themes and stories to give me a sense of where she was in her personal evolution. Chloé also has very strong sensory issues, especially with certain fabrics, so I needed to make sure that any clothing she wore was comfortable for her. And I tried to insert some of the symbolic aspects of what she and I discussed — protective colors, certain stones and animals. So explain the Oscars look, please. A crow had appeared in a dream Chloé had, and she felt the crow’s presence remain with her. She shared thoughts, impressions and some imagery tied to themes of death, surrender and rebirth. I did a deep dive and found a beautiful crow-themed tarot card set. Two days before her own runway show in Paris, Gabriela Hearst translated Chloé’s words into gowns, and the day before the Oscars, someone from her team hand-carried not one but two dark custom-made gown options to L.A. from Europe. Chloé mentioned wanting to wear a veil, so Gabriela sent some extra fabric. I’ll be honest, I was a bit skeptical. I worried it might feel too costume. But I wanted to respect the strong sentiment she had that she needed to wear one. So Sunday morning, at the crack of dawn, I spread out the silk chiffon that Gabriela sent and cut veil options myself. Miraculously, one came out in a beautiful oval shape with no jagged edges. Do you think this will inspire other directors to think of fashion more as a tool they can and should use? I hope it inspires everyone to think of fashion as a tool they can use. I believe that what one wears carries immense power that is often underrated. NUMBER OF THE WEEK
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Speaking of insider tales: After the Chanel show, I was backstage talking to its artistic director, Matthieu Blazy, and asked how he was feeling about the shopping mania going on in Chanel stores as editors raced to get a piece of his first collection, which has just arrived on shelves.
A week before the collection was delivered, he said, he had a dream about it. “I was sitting in the store with my boyfriend, and it was the opening, the first arrival of the collection,” he recalled. “And no one was entering. Then this man was proposing me cider.” He scratched his head. “Was it cider? Yes.”
Anxiety dreams! Designers get them, too.
Finally, since the Paris shows came to an end last week, there has been a host of fashion news:
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Think about that. Then catch up on all the Oscar fashion you may have missed, including the best trend of the night; consider why men wear shoes that are too big; and meet the nail artist of the moment.
Have a good, safe weekend.
OSCAR EXTRAVAGANZA | ||
critic’s notebook It’s Nice to See (Some) Actresses Wearing Dresses They Can Breathe InIt was the best trend on the Oscars red carpet. By Vanessa Friedman | ||
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Every week on Open Thread, Vanessa will answer a reader’s fashion-related question, which you can send to her anytime via email or X. Questions are edited and condensed.
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| Dana Golan for The New York Times |
To go gray or not to go gray is one of those perennial image questions that comes for us all at some point. One answer leads to a certain version of yourself; the other, a different one.
The decision about which way you go depends as much on psychology and emotion as it does on any practical considerations (though many of those are involved). It’s such a complicated choice that there are multiple Facebook groups, including The Gray Book and Silver Revolution, devoted to women who are thinking about no longer dyeing their hair. Each has more than 30,000 members.
The reasons for dyeing are pretty straightforward and were best articulated, as many things were, by Nora Ephron in her essay “On Maintenance.” Hair dye, she wrote, “has changed everything, but it almost never gets the credit. It’s the most powerful weapon older women have against the youth culture.”
Not only that, she wrote, “I can make a case that it’s partly responsible for the number of women entering (and managing to stay in) the job market in middle and late middle age.”
Gray hair, at least for women, shows aging in a way that is often seen as negative — a signal to the world, and sometimes to yourself, that you are in the end stage of life (and fertility) and thus, perhaps, less energetic or even employable, depending on whatever deep-held prejudices are at play. (For men, of course, it is the opposite. For them, the obvious vanity involved in dyeing one’s hair is seen as unmanly.)
Yet dyeing is expensive and time-consuming, and at a certain point your hair and your face no longer make sense together. It can be counterintuitively aging to clearly be denying your actual age by dyeing your hair. And I know many women for whom embracing their gray hair is enormously liberating, a way of declaring their refusal to be stereotyped or to kowtow to old-fashioned social pressures — to hide who they are.
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| Clockwise from top left: Sarah Harris; a model at the Batsheva runway show in 2024; Andie MacDowell; Mara Brock Akil; Kristen McMenamy; Paulina Porizkova; Lisa Bonet); and, center, Jane Fonda. Clockwise from top left, Gareth Cattermole; Arturo Holmes; Amy Sussman; The Hapa Blonde; Amy Sussman, all for Getty Images; Simon Ackerman/WireImage; Darren Gerrish/WireImage; Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images; center, Danny Moloshok/Reuters |
Sarah Harris, the former Vogue editor who started going gray in her 20s, has written about the joys of being “nonconformist.” The actresses Andie MacDowell and Lisa Bonet and the models Kristen McMenamy and Paulina Porizkova have built continued careers out on their silver hair. Besides, gray and silver and white are very elegant colors. There’s a reason Dior chose gray as a signature.
Alas, there’s no real way around the long, painful and public transformation process. According to Josh Wood, the hairstylist responsible for McMenamy’s gray, “Realistically, the quickest I’ve ever seen someone transition is nine months, but for most people it takes around 18 months.” (And that’s even if you decide to go shorter to help things along.)
To help things along, Linda Wells, the founding editor of Allure and current editor of Look on Air Mail, recommends a root touch-up kit during the transition. “Color Wow makes a really good one,” she said. “It looks natural, stays in place and can even endure a rain shower or quick swim.”
Another option from Linda: a new technique from L’Oréal called French blending that mixes the dyed color with your gray hair. You have to have it done in a salon, she said, but “the process is almost like adding highlights and lowlights with foils to integrate your dyed hair with the grays.”
Finally, once you have achieved full silver, remember to take care of your hair, s
