The 2026 Emmys carpet came and went on Sept. 14, and within hours every outlet had its ranked best-and-worst-dressed gallery up. One side says it's a fashion competition, everyone signed up for it, and pretending otherwise is precious; the other says we've collectively decided it's fine to be cruel about a stranger for clicks. Pick a side.
Join the debate to comment
Reading is free. Members pay to post — that's why it stays clean.
Add your commentThe celebrities didn't just "sign up for it" by existing on a red carpet. They signed up to be photographed. There is a meaningful difference between "I see what she was going for and it didn't land" and "here are fourteen words designed to make a stranger feel hideous." Fashion criticism has a vocabulary. These galleries don't use it.
I'm a plus-size woman who has never attended an awards show in my life and I still remember the specific way these lists made me feel about my own body at seventeen. The targets are famous. The audience learning lessons from the mockery is not.
The same people calling this "just fashion criticism" would absolutely lose their minds if their own outfit got screenshotted and posted to a national website with a comedian's mean caption underneath it. The empathy disappears the moment fame enters the room and that tells you everything you need to know about what this actually is.
The tell is always what adjectives get used. "The silhouette overwhelmed the look" — that's criticism. "She looked like she lost a fight with a curtain" — that's a joke at someone's expense. Both appear in these galleries, often in the same sentence, and only one of them has any business being there.
Nobody is pretending this is Pauline Kael writing about cinema. But the alternative being proposed here seems to be... no commentary at all? Fashion is a competitive, public, commercially motivated art form. Saying the gown failed is not the same as saying the person wearing it failed. We can hold both of those thoughts.
The "worst dressed" list as a concept is honestly just lazy. Any outlet can slap together twenty photos and write a punchline. Actual fashion journalism — the stuff that explains construction, references history, contextualizes a designer's arc — that takes skill. We've traded the harder thing for the easier cruelty and called it coverage.
Here's what nobody's saying: the celebrities most likely to land on worst-dressed lists are disproportionately the ones who took an actual swing — an unusual silhouette, a political statement, something handmade. The safest path to the best-dressed list is a neutral column of expensive fabric. We are literally ranking conformity above ambition and calling it taste.
i've been a wardrobe assistant for twelve years and i promise you the "worst dressed" ranking destroys real work by real people — stylists, seamstresses, beaders — who spent six weeks on a gown and now get to watch a gif of it under the caption "what even IS this." it's not about the celebrity. it's about everyone else who touched that dress.
I'm 67 and I've been reading these lists since the 80s and I'll tell you what changed: it used to be one column in a magazine you bought at the checkout. Now it's seventeen auto-playing videos, a TikTok compilation, a Twitter thread, a Reddit post, and a podcast episode, all within four hours. The cruelty didn't get worse. The surface area did.
To the person who said celebrities signed up for it — can you explain how you square that with the fact that several people on last night's worst-dressed lists are there because of a single bad angle chosen by an editor, not because the outfit was actually terrible? The photography is doing half the work and nobody's disclosing that.
Every year I read these lists and every year I think the same thing: half the "worst" looks are just unfamiliar. Structured, avant-garde, culturally specific — it gets called ugly because the writer's reference pool is too shallow to recognize what they're looking at. That's not criticism, that's a gap in education being weaponized against someone's creative risk.
If fashion criticism is legitimate then fashion critics should be willing to put their own name, face, and taste on record and defend their choices in real time. Not hide behind "our editors picked" or "readers voted." Own the take. Until that's standard practice, the power imbalance between the anonymous snark and the named target makes this something other than criticism.
fashion has always had critics. worth has always had critics. food has always had critics. acting has always had critics. why does clothing criticism suddenly become bullying the second the subject is a person instead of a plate of food
I disagree with the person who said fashion galleries are lazy. Curating a visual argument, picking the frame, writing under a word count, doing it live while the carpet is still happening — that's not nothing. The problem isn't the format. The problem is the incentive structure that rewards meanness over accuracy.
we really cannot hold both of those thoughts, judging by the actual comment sections under these galleries
twenty six comments in and nobody has actually named which look they think was wrongly dragged last night. we're having a very principled conversation that is carefully avoiding the specific thing that happened. say the look. be accountable to your own argument.
Look, I watched the Emmys with my thirteen-year-old daughter and she spent the whole carpet segment talking about who looked dumb. That's not the show teaching her that. That's the culture we've already built. The show just holds up a mirror.
This. The number of times I've seen a look rooted in a specific cultural tradition get mocked by writers who clearly did their homework on nothing — it's embarrassing for the publications, not the wearer.
Because the food didn't spend eight months choosing that dish to express something about itself? I don't know, that analogy does a lot of heavy lifting for you.
that is a genuinely good point and I hate that I'd never thought about it that way before
my cousin was on one of these lists a few years back, not a celebrity, just a presenter at a regional awards thing that got picked up nationally. she stopped leaving the house for a while. people act like there's a fame threshold that makes the damage okay. there isn't.
okay but nobody's crying for the celebrities here, they have publicists and therapists and net worths with more zeros than my zip code
okay but sometimes a dress just looks bad. not everything is a teachable moment about cultural competency
Is it wrong to choose not to have children just because you don't want to?
110 comments
Would you still eat meat if you had to kill the animal yourself?
109 comments
Are dating apps genuinely harder for men or for women?
108 comments
Would you tell your closest friends exactly how much money you make?
108 comments