Next time Angelina, do check the label

By Guy Adams in Los Angeles Friday, 30 January 2009

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Wrong way round: Angelina Jolie arrives at the 15th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards in Los Angeles

She is one of the most glamorous women on the planet, whose every red-carpet appearance is scrutinised by an army of photographers and tooth-sucking style commentators. But Angelina Jolie stands accused of an extraordinary fashion faux pas.

The actress sparked heated debate yesterday, after it emerged that the striking, but somehow odd-looking, blue dress she wore to Sunday's Screen Actors Guild awards in Los Angeles had been worn back to front.

Sharp-eyed pundits who pored over the pictures of Jolie negotiating the event's 200-yard red carpet noticed that her dress bore a striking resemblance to a $798 (£560) ball gown showcased at catwalk previews of designer Max Azria's spring collection.

The cornflower-blue frock had the same kimono-style sleeves and waistline as the silk dress worn by Azria's wafer-thin models, they remarked, together with identical detailing on the skirt. But its plunging neckline appeared to have been reversed to show off her back.

After the influential Red Carpet Fashion Awards website noticed the dress-reversal, fashion commentators began discussing the crucial issue of whether Jolie had been aware that it was on back-to-front.

Some speculated that she had accidentally got dressed the wrong way round. In a celebrity version of The Emperor's New Clothes, they said neither her partner Brad Pitt nor dozens of domestic staff had been brave enough to tell her of her wardrobe malfunction. Others described the move as an intentional, and ingenious, way for the 33-year-old actress to wear a dress that would otherwise have exposed an enormous portion of cleavage. They also claimed that reversing the garment allowed Jolie to showcase the collection of tattoos on her back.

Jolie's stylist, Jen Rade, issued a short statement to USMagazine yesterday, saying that her client had intentionally wore the dress that way round to make the outfit "more blouson".

But not everyone was convinced, noting that when Jolie discussed the garment in a red carpet interview with the TV show E! on Sunday, she made no mention of the fact it was on backwards, commenting merely: "I just like to be comfortable, I see what comfortable options are out there."

Cynics also noted that, if she had intended to expose her tattoos, the dress was hardly an unqualified success: the v-shaped neckline actually covered up half of the artworks.

Either way, the affair left some influential fashion commentators with egg on their faces. The Los Angeles Times critic Booth Moore, for example, failed to notice that the dress was on back-to-front when composing a lengthy analysis for Monday's newspaper. "Jolie is one of the few celebrities who has developed a signature red carpet look: drapey, goddess-like dresses that show off her tattooed shoulders, natural hair, minimal make-up and jewellery. Some have criticised the look as dowdy, but I would call it self-aware," he wrote.

"She's using clothing to control her image. In a way, Jolie is telling us she's transcended fashion and won't be at the whims of whatever designer or jeweller happens to be the highest bidder. That alone sets her apart from the starlet pack, giving her integrity as an actress and mother, instead of just a mannequin."

Attention will now turn to Jolie's outfit at next month's Oscars, for which she has been nominated for the Best Actress award for her role in Changeling. Meanwhile, whether she reversed the dress deliberately or not, the actress can at least reflect that she is following in a small yet memorable show-business tradition.

During the 1990s, the adolescent rap duo Kriss Kross sparked a trend for wearing jeans and t-shirts back to front. Meanwhile, at the 1999 Oscars, Celine Dion famously wore a white Dior tuxedo, backwards. That outfit, topped-off with an extravagant white fedora hat, was variously described as "bizarre" and "unflattering", and in some quarters even saw Dion compared to a "pimp".

Brad Pitt interview: why I had to face my own mortality

On the release of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the actor talks about his girlfriend Angelina Jolie, their six children – and how the film changed the way he looks at life.

 By John Hiscock Last Updated: 5:21PM GMT 29 Jan 2009

Unrecognisable: Brad Pitt takes the lead role in his latest movie, 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Brad Pitt has a reputation for being cheery and affable when he is making a movie. But not this time: the dark shadow of death hung over the set of his latest film, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.

Angelina Jolie's mother died a month after they began filming, director David Fincher's father died, as did writer Eric Roth's mother. And, to top it all, the film's controversial theme of ageing forced the actor to confront his own mortality.

"I walked away realising that time is short," he says, talking on a sound stage at the Warner Bros studios in Burbank, California. "I don't know if I have a day or 10 days or 10 years or 40 years. Am I halfway or am I close to the end? I don't know, so I have to make sure I don't waste those moments in any kind of pettiness or bitterness or laziness, and that I surround myself with the people who are most important to me.

"Angelina and I are together because we can enhance each other. I don't want to waste any time because I'm with company I really, really love."

As well as Angelina Jolie, the company includes their adopted children Maddox, seven, Pax, five, Zahara, three, and their biological babies Shiloh, two, and twins Knox and Vivienne, who were born in last July.

To make the most of the time he has left, Pitt and Jolie are already planning to add more children to their family. "We haven't found any reason to stop yet," he laughs. "It's chaos at times, but there's such joy in the house. I look and there's our boy from Vietnam and our daughter from Ethiopia, and our girl was born in Namibia, and our son is from Cambodia, and they're brothers and sisters, man. They're brothers and sisters and it's a sight for elation.

"We have the capability to give a child a home, and let me tell you it's selfish, too, because the reward has been extraordinary."

The twins, he says, mean double the pleasure. "One seemed simple, and it's just double the fun. It's surprising how soon their personalities have started emerging. But it's really important that everyone gets their individual time as well as group time together.

"We were four before, and we got into our rhythms and it worked. Then someone new comes in, and it discombobulates the movements for a moment, but then you settle in again and it just all works. Everyone's pretty well integrated. It's not the first time new kids have come in."

Pitt is feeling a little jet-lagged, having flown in from Berlin, where he and the family are living temporarily while he films the Second World War story Inglorious Bastards for Quentin Tarantino.

He received a Golden Globe best-actor nomination for his role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which he plays a man born old and wrinkled and then ages backwards. Aged 50, he falls in love with a 30-year-old woman (Cate Blanchett) and they must come to terms with the relationship as they age in opposite directions. "It's about looking back on your significant moments in life," he says.

The film's story and the deaths of relatives of people around him set him thinking about pain and loss. "I had a friend who worked at a hospice, and he said people in their final moments don't discuss their successes, awards or what books they wrote or what they accomplished. They only talk about their loves and their regrets, and I think that's very telling.".

He has not yet discussed matters of life and death with his children. "Our oldest is seven and at the point where he's asking these questions, but the others are too young, but I wrestle with it now.

"It's hard to help them fully comprehend this, and I don't know if they're meant to comprehend it yet, in all fairness, but it's a big issue."

Their filming schedules and charity work take Pitt and Jolie around the world, and the children go to school in whichever country they happen to be at the time. "We're a very nomadic family, and it works for us," says Pitt.

"The value of it is that the family becomes the core, and the kids may not understand the places they see at this early age, but I know it's seeping into their consciousness. We move quite well, and I don't think it's taking its toll. We have to think about schooling, though, and we're in an international programme, so wherever we go it's the same curriculum."

While filming demands keep him busy, his charity work takes up even more of his time. Like Jolie, he has learned to make good use of his celebrity status to promote the causes close to his heart, such as fighting poverty and hunger in third-world nations. A keen student of architecture and a close friend of leading architect Frank Gehry, he has also been using his money and knowledge to help rebuild areas of New Orleans devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

He says the project is going well: "We wanted to help people to be able to return to the city because they were in limbo and wanted to come back, but whole neighbourhoods had been wiped out. We saw this as an opportunity to be a proving ground for high-performance buildings and a greener approach.

"Now, for an area like this that suffered such injustice to suddenly become the greenest, most advance neighbourhood in the US is an incredible achievement. This time next year we'll have more than 100 homes up, and there's no reason this shouldn't work outside New Orleans. There's something at play here that is bigger than just a starting point."

Pitt sees his duties as being a companion and father, making movies and helping charitable causes. "What's valuable to me has become clearer as I've got older," he says. "To me, it's about the value of your time and your day and the value of the people you spend it with. It's about me being a strong father and guide and a good match for my significant other. Then, if I'm going to go to work, it must be something of value to me.

"I'm much more experienced now, so I can find films that are interesting quicker and cut out the films that don't really matter. It means more to me now because my kids are going to see them, and I want them to be proud."

'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' is released next Fri.