Olivia Wilde Masters the Tricky Art of Director Style

When it came time to promote her latest film, The Invite, Olivia Wilde was faced with a choice: dress like an actor or dress like a director.

The concept is absurdly sexist—surely Orson Welles, John Cassavetes, and Clint Eastwood never had to take it into account—but it’s a persistent question posed to women actor-directors. It certainly doesn’t help that, in the 97-year history of the Academy Awards, only nine women have ever been nominated for Best Director. (Just one of them, Emerald Fennell, starred in the film she was nominated for, Promising Young Woman.) In a narrow pool, men are the prescriptive model.

Wilde knows there is a difference between dressing like an actor and dressing like a director. For The Invite, she chose the latter.

While women directors are making headway in terms of personal style (Chloé Zhao, Coralie Fargeat, and Greta Gerwig are among those leading the charge) there is still plenty of uncharted territory—and gendered expectations. Fashion is not as emphasized for directors as it is for the actors, the faces of the films they star in. They are allowed to be dressed down. But women face a double standard: lean too hard into fashion and be perceived as unserious, ignore it altogether and be deemed an uncaring slob.

With stylist Karla Welch, Wilde walked the fine line, building out a press tour wardrobe that was both stylish and relaxed, rife with cool, imminently wearable pieces in a neutral palette. “I really love not having to dress up in the same way as I have as an actress,” she recently told Chloe Malle on The Run-Through With Vogue. Indeed, for Late Night With Seth Meyers, she opted for a black Officine Générale three-piece suit paired with sneakers, and tucked an outsized charcoal tee into slouchy trousers for a screening at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation. Flat shoes were also a welcome sight; ruched Reformation loafers punctuate trousers, T-shirts, and slip skirts, while, at the London screening, Wilde paired her black Calvin Klein Collection apron dress with black high-vamped flats.

Still, Wilde decries the notion that women directors must forsake their femininity. “I also don’t wanna promote this idea that in order to be taken seriously like the men, we have to not feminize ourselves. I don’t think that’s true at all,” she said on The Run-Through. Take, after all, the operatic custom Saint Laurent gown—replete with puffed shoulders, a tiered skirt, and an ab-baring cutout—she wore to the Los Angeles premiere.

But when it comes down to it, Wilde’s directorial fashion philosophy is simple: “I do feel like after decades of tarting myself up for press tours, I am so relieved to be like, ‘You know what? They wear T-shirts. I’m gonna wear a fucking T-shirt.’”