As worn by Alicia Vikander at the Oscars, Beyoncé in Lemonade and now Emma Watson as a feisty new Belle, the yellow dress is a curveball piece for a curveball era
This has been a year in which supposedly well-informed people have turned out to be woefully wrong in their predictions about many things, some of them really quite important, which makes me feel slightly better about what I am about to admit. OK, here goes: I was wrong, in February, about Alicia Vikander’s Oscars dress. I was right to say that she was channelling Belle from Beauty and the Beast, in her lemon strapless dress. But what I failed to grasp was that, in 2016, this was in fact a good thing; that Disney’s Belle was about to be rediscovered as a feminist hero by actor and UN goodwill ambassador Emma Watson. In an upcoming live-action film, Watson plays her as “a feisty young woman who spoke her mind and had all these ambitions, and was incredibly independent, wanted to see the world and was so smart”. In the new film, Belle has been brought up to date and given a career as an inventor. The yellow dress from the 1991 original, however, retains pride of place on screen – albeit with the sickly, 90s shade of the original (very Cher in Clueless, looking back) filtered into a softer mid-century yellow, the sort of shade that makes for a chic velvet sofa against a grey wall.
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