Unless, of course, your name is Michelle Yeoh.
Yeoh, who appears poised to become the first-ever Asian winner of the Oscar for best actress, has spent the 2022-2023 awards season racking up nominations and trophies for a distinctly idiosyncratic performance — and making headlines with edgy, risk-taking style choices. Yeoh’s recent run of daring, funky looks mirrors her choice to take on something as ambitious and quirky as Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once” at a point in her career where many actors might contentedly stay in their lane. Both gambles are paying off spectacularly.
The Malaysian-born Yeoh rose to fame first in Hong Kong cinema, then in Hollywood in the late 1990s. In last year’s “Everything Everywhere,” she plays Evelyn Wang, a beleaguered Chinese American mom and laundromat owner who becomes an unlikely superhero when she discovers during an IRS audit that she must abruptly start jumping between parallel universes, some more bizarre than others, to save the world. After some years delivering strong supporting performances as wise, stoic elder-stateswoman types (see: “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” her acclaimed guest-starring arc on “Star Trek: Discovery”), Yeoh surprises and delights in such a deeply weird but meaty starring role. She chugs two-liter bottles of orange soda and texts with her feet just as gamely as she whips out her famed martial-arts skills.
Her wardrobe, similarly, has been surprising and delighting nearly ever since.
In recent years, Yeoh has gravitated toward understated (or as plenty of other women of her generation might say, “classy”) silhouettes in shimmery neutrals and pastels such as champagne, silver and gentle mint green.
But in the past few months, Yeoh has been on something of a tear, eschewing mature modesty in favor of whimsy and joy with the help of stylist Jordan Johnson Chung. At the Palm Springs Film Festival in January, Yeoh wore a two-piece Schiaparelli ensemble consisting of a glittering brick-red bolero with a black swirl pattern and a creamy light-blue silk skirt twisted into a (very on-trend) rosette. For the BAFTA Tea Party, she wore a single-breasted shorts suit in lilac by Off-White; to the awards, she wore another pink suit, this one a pearlescent double-breasted Dior with exaggerated cape sleeves. At the Critics Choice Awards, she bet big on sleeves again, in a Carolina Herrera with magnificently voluminous magenta sleeves that swooped down into a dramatic train.
At the Screen Actors Guild Awards in February, Yeoh again wore Schiaparelli; this time, a strapless gown with what looked like a spray of delicious, glittering golden french fries, sequined and exploding all the way down the front. And at the Independent Spirit Awards this month, Yeoh wore a navy Gucci dress with a substantial cornflower-colored garland helixing over the shoulder and across the bodice.
Striking silhouettes, bold colors, near-comically unconventional details galore. To wear a dress or an outfit like any of these is to accept that you will be the center of attention while wearing it. It is to accept the risk that the clothes might have an upstaging effect, even; that, as some say, the dress might wear you.
But when such clothes are paired with Yeoh’s regal presence — and the glow of widespread mainstream appreciation, at last, for her steadfast presence in the industry and her apparent appetite, even in middle age, for new adventures — the whole spectacle seems to say: Look how much dress she can wear and still command your attention all on her own.
