Last night at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Michael B. Jordan arrived wearing a heinous floral harness over a beautiful navy double-breasted suit. Twitter quickly erupted with the question: “Between Timothée Chalamet and Michael B. Jordan, is the awards show harness officially a thing now?”
I hope not. A few weeks ago, “Beautiful Boy” star Timothée Chalamet debuted the outfit-ruining accessory, better known as the Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton black sparkly bib, on the Golden Globes red carpet. During an interview on “Ellen,” Degeneres complimented the harness, but Chalamet corrected her: “Yeah no, I thought it was a bib, they told me it was a bib.”
Chalamet then made a point to dispel the rumors that the harness was part of a “sex dungeon culture” thing. Why on Earth would a young adult celebrity male prefer his fans to think he’s wearing an adult bib over being associated with kinky sex? Especially during the E.L. James-Christian Gray obsession era?
As confirmed by the New York Times fashion critic, Vanessa Friedman, Louis Vuitton wants the harness to be called an “embroidered bib.” According to QZ, “Abloh did several colorful versions of the bib for his debut at Louis Vuitton. The “embroidered” version looks similar to one of those, only bedazzled. Meanwhile, the overall concept appears to draw pretty heavily from actual holsters created by Helmut Lang over a decade ago; Abloh has looked to the fashion house for inspiration in the past.”
The idea that the “embroidered bib” was inspired by holsters actually made me look twice at the thing. Holsters are very cool, especially when worn for their intended purpose: carrying a firearm. But you know what’s not cool? A harness used for nothing with flowers on it. You know what’s also not cool? Grown men wearing bibs.
When Jordan was asked about his floral harness/man bib, he told Variety: “Why not? It was just like f—k it. I’m going to do it.” You shouldn’t have done it, Michael!
The “embroidered bib” ranks somewhere on the scale of horrible millennial fashion choices around the “RompHim” and Coachella garb. It’s obviously not as terrible as men contorting themselves to fit into a onesie and it’s not as amusingly idiotic as phony models culturally appropriating Native American headdress for an Instagram post.
Whether the Louis Vuitton accessory is a bib, harness, or fake holster, wearing it is another cry for attention masked as a fashion statement and it needs to go away.
