Emma Corrin Steps Out in This Season’s Campiest Dress

Emma Corrin first rocketed to fame with her astonishing, Golden Globe-winning performance as Princess Diana in The Crown in the winter of 2020. Lockdowns around the world meant there was nary a red carpet to be found—but that didn’t prove to be a challenge for Corrin or her stylist Harry Lambert. The pair of mad sartorial geniuses whizzed up an endless carousel of brilliant, fashion-forward looks that kept everyone on their toes, even when most of the appearances were being made through a laptop screen.

Since then, Corrin has established herself as a true style renegade, with a particularly keen eye for avant-garde looks from the likes of Schiaparelli, Prada, and JW Anderson. She’s also become a recurring star of Miu Miu’s campaigns, and has made plenty of showstopping appearances on IRL red carpets, whether the swimming cap chic of her 2021 Emmys look or her look at the BIFA Awards last year by emerging designer Marco Ribeiro. To attend the Olivier Awards in London tonight, however—where Corrin was nominated for her performance in the play Anna X—she and Lambert clearly decided to pull out all the stops.

Corrin’s dress was, naturally, straight off the runway. A piece from Jonathan Anderson’s fall 2022 collection for Loewe—a stand-out from Paris Fashion Week in February for its delightfully bonkers riffs on the history of surrealism across art and fashion—it featured one of Anderson’s most playful new motifs, the balloon. (Here, that came printed across a mesh slip dress in shades of tan.) The most arresting detail, though, sat a little higher up, with a pair of deflated balloons cast as a kind of breastplate.

At first glance, it felt like a nod to armor, pairing perfectly with Corrin’s newly bleached hair and its cropped, Joan of Arc-style fringe, as well as the sculptural jewelry she wore from Cartier’s Trinity for Chitose Abe collection. But on closer inspection, it revealed itself as a nod to something a little tongue-in-cheek—taking the unsavory metaphor of breasts as balloons and turning it into something so knowingly silly it could be straight out of a John Waters film. As if to confirm the look’s subversive, campy sensibility, Lambert captioned his post of Corrin on Instagram: “This one is for the gays!”