Red Carpet Menswear Is Back

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“I missed this,” a grinning Barry Keoghan told photographers on the red carpet at the Saltburn premiere in Los Angeles this week. The Irish actor joined his co-star (and GQ 2023 Men of the Year honoree) Jacob Elordi at the event, where they wordlessly heralded in a post-SAG-strike decree: Red carpet menswear is back and as wily as ever.

Elordi wore a sheeny, truffle-brown three-piece Burberry suit, which looked austere in a ’90s Daniel Day-Lewis sort of way—which, given the Australian actor’s formative appreciation for Day-Lewis’s sartorial choices and current inclination towards classic menswear, may have been his intention here. (Unfortunately, Elordi did not opt to keep the eyebrow piercing his Saltburn character, Felix, briefly sports in the film.) Keoghan, in keeping with the no-rules fashion rulebook that famous dudes have followed in recent years, pulled up like he was dressed for an entirely different occasion (or, perhaps, a pub afterparty) in a black leather moto vest, white Oxford shirt, and black jeans by Givenchy. In other words, Elordi and Keoghan were the Hailey and Justin Bieber of the Saltburn premiere.

Days earlier, English actor Tom Blyth—who stars in the new Hunger Games prequel, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes—attempted to strike a balance between gussied-up and dressed-down at the film’s L.A. premiere. He wore a knee-length, scarf-collared formal coat by Valentino, which he later removed to reveal a thin-strapped black tank top tucked into a pair of wide-legged trousers. Since the crushing wave of the no-shirt suit in 2022, we’ve seen a surge of tank tops under jackets on the red carpet. All of which is to say: the SAG strike may be over, but the Hollywood biceps remain.

And then there was Joaquin Phoenix—who has never really hewed to any particular ordinance, style or otherwise—at the Paris premiere of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. Phoenix, wearing a rakish cropped suit by Stella McCartney, loosened the black tie around his neck to hang loose and askew. His ankle-bone-length trousers showed off the bright white socks tucked into his dress shoes. The actor reportedly left the theater before the film began, causing Variety’s Elsa Keslassy to wonder, “Is he still in character?” Perhaps if there is ever a red-carpeted event for the rumored 270-minute-long director’s cut of Napoleon, its star will wear an excessively long suit jacket and un-hemmed trousers for the occasion. But as these things go, let’s not count on it.

Originally Appeared on GQ

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