What the Dress Owes Scarlett
Fashion’s central paradox, the one nobody in the industry wants to name directly, is that the garment is supposed to be the point and yet nobody looks at the garment unless a specific body is wearing it. Runway coverage is full of deliberately interchangeable faces—blank, beautiful, designed to not distract from the cut. It works as a system. Then someone puts Scarlett Johansson in the frame and the whole logic folds.
Carine Roitfeld built her name as editor of Vogue Paris and has spent the years since running CR Fashion Book and consulting for Harper’s Bazaar. For this portfolio—"Singular Beauties," shot by Karl Lagerfeld against a black backdrop, running across all 29 international editions of Harper’s Bazaar from September—she pulled together a group of women whose relationship to fame operates in entirely different registers. Dakota Fanning, somewhere in the passage between childhood icon and whatever more complicated thing comes after. Grimes, who exists entirely outside the usual codes of what a pop figure is supposed to look like or want. And Johansson, who has spent the last decade becoming the fixed point around which a dozen different kinds of cultural conversation orbit.
Lagerfeld’s black backdrop is his preferred staging for this kind of work—controlled, abstract, nowhere in particular—which concentrates all the energy on the subject. There’s no environmental context to retreat into, no styling narrative to hide behind. Roitfeld’s casting knows this: she’s chosen people whose existing public selves generate friction with the clothes, and that friction is where the pictures become interesting rather than merely expensive.
Whether it indicts fashion that it needs famous faces to make anyone pay attention is a question I keep half-asking and then setting down. The honest answer is probably yes, and also: I don’t particularly care. Johansson in front of a black backdrop, in clothes designed for a different kind of image conversation, is still a better picture than most of what fashion produces when it tries to stand entirely on its own authority. Some paradoxes are more comfortable left unresolved. Better to just look.