On stage to accept the coveted Style Icon award at the InStyle Awards in Los Angeles last night, Cate Blanchett took the opportunity to champion women’s freedom of expression.
“For me, the true icons of style, and I think there’s a bit of a theme emerging here tonight, it’s that for me it’s always those women who’ve been utterly themselves without apology – whose physical presence and aesthetic is really integrated in a non-self-conscious way,” she began.
“Women who know how they look, it’s not all of who they are but just an extension of that, and it’s about women who feel free to wear what they want, when they want and how they want to wear it,” she continued.
And then, her mic drop moment: “Women like looking sexy, but it doesn’t mean we want to f**k you.”
“No-one says to Steve Bannon, ‘you look like a bag of trash, do you want me to throw you out?’ But the comments that get said about what women wear on the red carpet – I mean, if you trawl through those trolls on the internet… just don’t,” she said.
Blanchett’s speech was met with thunderous applause:
Dressed in graphic stripped Givenchy, the actress also thanked designers including Giorgio Armani, who she named as her mentor, Riccardo Tisci, Nicolas Ghesquiere, Claire Waight Keller, Sarah Burton and Stella McCartney.
