Halsey, Dua Lipa, Rita Ora, and other celebrities will wear white roses to this Sunday’s Grammy Awards in support of the Time’s Up movement.
This statement of solidarity was led by Meg Harkins (SVP at Rock Nation) and Karen Rait (rhythmic promotions head at Promotion, Interscope/Geffen/A&M Records), whose group Voices in Entertainment wrote a letter encouraging artists to participate. They credited their choice of white rose to its symbolism of “hope, peace, sympathy, and resistance.” The white rose also alludes to suffragettes, who wore white to protests.
The initiation of Time’s Up was made this New Year’s Day by over 300 entertainers and film industry employees. The movement’s goal is to fight sexual harassment in the workplace through a legal defense fund for its victims, which many see as a progression of the #MeToo movement.
The resulting social atmosphere puts pressure on Grammys participants to address gender inequality in a poignant yet tasteful manner.
After all, #MeToo, the predecessor of Time’s Up, was criticized not only by the right for its flexible definition of sexual assault but by the left for doing little to include low-income women.
Even the movement’s first demonstration at the Golden Globe Awards — in which actors wore black outfits and Time’s Up pins to symbolize grief — was accused of being at best muted and at worst a fashion statement disguised as political action.
Despite this backlash, Time’s Up will continue to put a spotlight on harassment through its upcoming demonstration at the 2018 Grammy Awards.
Prior to the Golden Globes, Eva Longoria famously told The New York Times that “we’ve sold these awards shows as women, with our gowns and colors and our beautiful faces and our glamour. This time the industry can’t expect us to go up and twirl around. That’s not what this moment is about.”
The Time’s Up movement aims to bring this mentality to the Grammys. However, there is reason to question whether that mentality was ever there to begin with.
These protests may make systematic harassment a national conversation, but they do so in a way that is largely performative. Wearing black designer gowns and white roses to lavish award ceremonies is by no means a boycott. Although wardrobe choices give the movement’s defense fund public attention, it’s difficult to argue that they change the industry’s expectations of women.
After all, by making the Golden Globes dress code a beautiful black gown — something that’s been worn to award ceremonies many times before — the movement failed in asking its participants for something that would genuinely affect the audience’s viewing experience.
It’s unlikely that the decision to wear white roses will be any different. If anything, these dress codes have simply highlighted a privilege that comes only with stardom: the ability to gain publicity for supposedly heroic deeds that require no sacrifice at all.
However, the real issue isn’t that celebrities who participate in this movement will gain more than they sacrifice. It’s that they insist it is a protest against gowns and colors and beautiful faces and glamour and going up and twirling around, when in fact, these elements of the award ceremony are very much intact.
There is no denying that Time’s Up and #MeToo indicate a progression towards lower tolerance for sexual harassment. However, to say that muted dress codes have changed the film industry’s culture, especially when the movement is still in its infancy, gives Time’s Up much more credit than it deserves.