Jennifer Aniston arrived at the Golden Globes sporting the same haircut she had when she played Rachel Green, in the earliest years of Friends. It stopped many star-gazers dead in their tracks, because the public record is quite clear on this: Aniston hated that look, thinking it was ugly. But she dusted it off anyway, as a gift of cultural nostalgia, a portal back to an innocent time, when Matthew Perry was still alive and young people could afford to pay rent, and the world was full of promise – and, for a girl with the right highlights, nothing could stand in her way. If Aniston can alter this little, after this much time, maybe nothing is as different as it feels?
But the more powerful hit of times past came from Gillian Anderson’s dress: it looked elegant, unremarkable, maybe a little bridal, even. Nothing to see here, just a fine-looking woman in white. Look closer, and you’ll see it’s embroidered; closer still, that the pattern is like nothing you’ve seen before. She called it her vagina dress, which was very on-brand, given her role as the sex therapist mum in Sex Education, yet at the same time very off-brand, because those are actually vulvas.
Anderson chose it “for so many reasons”, she told a flustered reporter on the red carpet, leaving the world to speculate on what exact combination it represented: between a defence of female reproductive autonomy, a reclamation of the yoni from the forces of patriarchal squeamishness and a giant, “well, you didn’t see that coming, did you?” It would have been less satisfying if she’d worn this in the X-Files years, because we wouldn’t have had X to post our thoughts on, and therefore would have missed out on the collective baffled delight, with the obligatory chaser of vulva/vagina pedantry that I’ll always be happy to add to. And yet it did feel very 90s in spirit, a kind of exuberant, provocative “never mind exactly what it means; suffice to say, it means I’ll wear what I like”.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
