Then, for an afterparty, Cate slipped into a velvet Giorgio Armani jumpsuit and floor-length pink coat. It’s her choice of shoes (or lack thereof), though, that proved a point of discussion. Footwear has been a bone of contention at Cannes for years, with festival organizers endorsing a de facto rule that women must wear heels at all public events. Kristen Stewart protested the diktat in 2018—slipping off her Christian Louboutin pumps halfway down the red carpet. “If you’re not asking guys to wear heels and a dress, you cannot ask me either,” she declared. Julia Roberts had done the same in 2016, a year after reports that the festival turned away a group of women from a Carol screening for wearing flats.
For her part, Blanchett’s decision to ditch her stilettos represented a feminist defiance of Cannes’s painfully backwards directives, but it also served to highlight the need to think of women’s rights globally—not just on the Croisette. During an appearance at The Majestic Cannes, Cate stood before the assembled press barefoot while presenting French-Iranian star Zahra Amir Ebrahimi with a breakthrough artist award.
Ebrahimi, who won best actress at Cannes in 2022 for her performance in Holy Spider, was forced to flee Iran in her twenties after an intimate video of her with her boyfriend was leaked by a friend – with authorities in Tehran promptly drawing up a criminal case against her for having pre-marital sex. If convicted, she would have been subjected to both lashes and years in jail. “This is to stab everyone who stands in the way of women’s rights,” Ebrahimi declared onstage, before calling out her home country for “executing innocent people”. If Cannes still has a long way to go when it comes to gender equality, at least the female stars in attendance are doing their part to call out sexism at every turn.
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