Phoebe Bridgers, the Gallagher brothers and more stars arrive at the 2026 Venice Film Festival

Black Dominates the Lido: Fashion and Friction at the 2026 Venice Film Festival

Earthguardiansonline.com – Every September, the canals around Venice’s Lido island fill with motorboats carrying Hollywood’s most visible faces to a ten-day gathering of cinema’s elite. The 2026 edition of the Venice Film Festival is now well into its run, and the sartorial story emerging from the red carpet has been strikingly uniform: an almost monastic devotion to black. Where past editions have splashed color across the shoreline, this year’s attendees have gravitated toward restrained, sculptural silhouettes that read more like gallery installations than runway moments.

The Weight of Black

From the festival’s jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal to a roster that includes Chase Sui Wonders, Laura Dern, Vittoria Ceretti, Amal Clooney, and Rooney Mara, floor-length black gowns have become the default uniform of the carpet. The effect is less a fashion statement than a collective mood — somber, architectural, deliberately stripped of ornament. In a year when the competing films skew toward political thriller and existential drama, the wardrobe seems to mirror the programming: stripped of excess, weighted toward gravity.

Two exceptions have punctuated the darkness. Kendall Jenner made her Venice debut in a golden archival piece from Armani’s Fall-Winter 1995 collection, a garment that carried the sheen of late-1990s maximalism into a sea of matte black. Across the carpet, John Malkovich chose irreverence over restraint, arriving in a Dior ensemble featuring an exaggerated, Shakespearean frilly collar that turned heads and prompted laughter in equal measure.

Coupled Silhouettes

Coordinated couple dressing has been another recurring motif. Opening night belonged to George and Amal Clooney, who appeared in matched Tom Ford tailoring — his-and-hers cuts that echoed each other without being identical. Later, at the premiere of Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard, sisters Rooney and Kate Mara arrived in deliberately clashing monochrome: Rooney in Louis Vuitton, Kate in Armani Privé, the two looks forming a visual argument about minimalism’s boundaries.

The most talked-about pairing of the week came on Saturday night, when Oasis brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher stepped onto the carpet together — a rarity that drew sustained applause. Both eschewed the band’s trademark streetwear aesthetic in favor of understated, all-black ensembles, a choice that felt less like fashion and more like a quiet reclamation of their public image after years of distance from the spotlight.

A Lineup of Shadows

Venice has long functioned as an early barometer for the awards season that follows, and the 2026 competition slate reinforces that role. The films vying for the Golden Lion prize lean heavily into darkness and political urgency. Danny Boyle’s Ink, an adaptation of the acclaimed stage play tracing the early years of media mogul Rupert Murdoch (played by Guy Pearce) and his acquisition of London tabloid The Sun, opened the festival. Robert Pattinson and musician Phoebe Bridgers headline Primetime, a thriller biopic centered on Chris Hansen, the Dateline NBC presenter behind the infamous To Catch a Predator segment. On Wednesday, audiences will see Florian Zeller’s Bunker, in which real-life partners Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem portray a couple whose marriage frays after the husband agrees to construct a survivalist bunker for a tech billionaire.

The Gender Gap on the Competition Slate

Yet the lineup has drawn pointed criticism for its thin representation of women behind the camera. Only two films in the main competition are directed by women: May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown and Rachel Szor’s NAZA. The disparity has sharpened an ongoing conversation about financing structures in global cinema, where women directors continue to face steeper hurdles securing budgets for feature-length work.

Gyllenhaal, presiding over the jury, addressed the imbalance directly during the festival’s press events.

“There’s a systemic problem. It’s much harder for women to get their films financed,” she said. “Who decides what’s good and valuable?”

The question lands with particular force given that Gyllenhaal herself is also screening a short Marilyn Monroe biopic starring Dakota Johnson and Ellen Burstyn — a project outside the competition but one that underscores how few platforms remain for female-directed narratives, even in non-competitive slots.

As the festival moves toward its closing days, the fashion record will be remembered for its near-total embrace of black, its rare flashes of gold and frill, and the quiet solidarity of couples dressing in tandem. But the more consequential story of the 2026 edition may be the one told in what is absent from the competition slate — and the questions that absence continues to provoke.