The Deal With Angelina Jolie’s Dress

Why her wedding gown represents the “good” in herself and the “bad” in society

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It’s been almost a month since the news of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s nuptials had taken the world by storm. Even more attention grabbing than their long-anticipated union was the bride’s unusual wedding dress, helmed by a group of creative buds that comprised of not only Atelier Versace’s esteemed tailor Luigi Massi but also all six of the newlyweds’ children.

Looking at it from the front, Jolie’s dress looked to be a clean, unscathed vision of white, but just a 180-degrees turn would show us otherwise. Unmistakably peppering Jolie’s long train that trailed behind her were her children’s doodles and scribbles on it, all inerasable not only by the suspected permanent nature of the markers they’d used to create them but also Massi’s high-end threads that had sewn those messages of love intact and locked them for as long as the dress keeps.

From the moment this dress was unveiled on the likes of Hello and People magazine covers right up to this present moment in which I’m writing this piece, a vast array of comments have been made on this novel take on what’s supposed to be the center of a woman’s most important event in life. A wedding dress is after all “the most important piece of clothing a woman will ever have” or so the media, high fashion and wedding service industries would establish and have aligned with our understanding.

While an undeniable big portion of Jolie-Pitt supporters and radical fashion lovers saw the dress as a unique way of celebrating a life-changing domestic arrangement, a larger bulk of the comments on it had leaned towards unabashed criticism on Jolie and Pitt’s apparent lack of parenting skills or control over their children.

New York Post reporter Jane Ridley for one led the panel of critics. “Jolie’s dress is Exhibit A in the case of overindulgent parents gone mad” because “what started as a well-meaning trend – rewarding children for every single achievement, telling them they can do no wrong – has spiraled out of control.”

Some even agreed on the tainting of haute couture, as Luke O’Neil would glorify. “The images [of the dress] which are running in People and Hello magazine, show Jolie’s Luigi Massi gown and bodice with flowing skirt and veil despoiled by all manner of crude drawings, apparently done when the actress left it unattended on a trip to the fridge for a juice box,” the BULLETT writer said.

A writer from The Guardian nodded in agreement, deeming the dress “defaced in the most domestic of ways”, before punching in her cunningly masked disapproval. “The fact that this unique, family-first, anti-vanity motif comes on the poshest of dresses – couture Atelier Versace, for heaven’s sake – is the wedding equivalent of a fashion editor shuffling into a meeting in scuffed trainers and jogging bottoms that just happen to fit perfectly and be by Céline.”

Perhaps such critical views mushroomed because not many can identify with the jet setting, “celebrity” lifestyle employed by the Jolie and Pitt household. And maybe it simply boils down to the fact that people are tolerant of trendily negative evaluations of Jolie’s fashion choices; after all, this is the same woman who’d graced the red carpet in questionable and eyebrow-raising attires in her pre-family days (remember the vampy dress in which she’d once kissed her brother in public?).

But whichever lens a naysayer chooses to adopt on the topic, one thing remains certain: society cares about how and what Jolie’s wedding dress should look like, while she is busy feeling happy to have enabled her children’s creativity in a way she believes to be right. Her attention to her children, lavish or not, is paid amidst a global setting where approximately 40 million children under the age of 15 suffer familial abuse or neglect every year, enough to warrant medical intervention.

Society also loses their mind and sleep over the “ruined” state of what’s supposed to be a designer piece of ceremonious attire, while she is still probably on cloud nine today over the fact that her wedding dress like any other woman’s is indeed the most important piece of clothing she’ll ever have – but only because her children were completely involved in it, their innocent youth forever emblazoned for her memory’s sake. In Jolie’s eyes, she is a damn good mother, because she is providing for her children to the maximum capacity within the perimeters of her individual capability.

“I wanted the kids to be part of everything including the dress because that’s our family. That represents the way we live our life together,” the actress had gushed excitedly, and that’s all we really know.

So in the end, does Angelina Jolie’s taste in haute couture wedding attires – good or bad – reflect her way of thinking and appreciating life as one single individual, or does it uncover our way of thinking and appreciating life as a global society at large? Does the involvement of her children in the makings of her unusual dress portray her distorted view on fashion, or does it reveal our own tendency to view the industry as a dichotomy where things are either “luxuriously perfect” or “cheapened” by action?

And above all, do Angelina Jolie’s choices in life reveal more of her “lavish” upkeeps as a celebrity, or do they echo our obsession with classifying things into highs, middles and lows that, in the end, feeds the very definition of “hierarchy” in the first place?