At trial, Gwyneth Paltrow is dressing for where she’d rather be

When famous people have to go on trial, one of many crucial choices they face is how to dress. Should they bring the aura and the trappings of their outsize fame with them, or shrink down to their distinctly only-as-large-as-life civilian selves?

Showing up styled as the entity known to the public can assert power – yet it risks absurdity, under unflattering fluorescent lights, juxtaposed with lawyers, judges and courthouse personnel in their everyday work uniforms. Assuming a more pedestrian, scaled-down, appropriate-for-the-setting look, by contrast, can communicate seriousness – but can also remind jurors and other observers, perhaps inconveniently, that megacelebrities are, after all, just frail and fallible humans like everyone else.

This week, actress and Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow has appeared before a Utah court where she is accused of crashing into a fellow skier, 76-year-old retired optometrist Terry Sanderson, while vacationing in Park City in 2016. Sanderson alleges that Paltrow fled afterward and that the collision left him with broken ribs and permanent brain damage, and after initially seeking US $3 million, Sanderson is now suing Paltrow for US $300,000. Paltrow, in turn, is countersuing Sanderson for US $1 and the cost of her legal fees, claiming it was actually Sanderson who crashed into her.

Baked into Paltrow’s defence is the belief that Sanderson’s suit aims to exploit Paltrow’s wealth and celebrity, and this week, Paltrow’s courtroom style choices seem to silently address that sentiment. In gold jewellery and luxe-looking riffs on traditional businesslike silhouettes like the suit, cardigan and turtleneck sweater, her hair loose and make-up modest, Paltrow has effectively split the difference between demure propriety and power glam. She has simultaneously telegraphed two messages that very well could have been at odds: “Look, I’m just a mum who tried to take her teenagers on a nice ski vacation,” and “Yes I am wealthy and famous, and I shan’t be wasting my time on this.”

You don’t have to have Billy Flynn as your lawyer to know that when you’re a defendant, it behooves you to give the impression you couldn’t possibly have committed the act in question. Many famous defendants have aimed for respectability, maturity, wide-eyed innocence or even pitiful decrepitude on their days in court.

In 2005, Lil’ Kim set aside the candy-coloured, eye-popping ensembles she was famous for in favour of a crisp white blouse, conventionally pretty make-up and a tan suit with subtle pinstripes – Midtown business executive chic – to appear in federal court on a charge of perjury related to a shooting outside a New York radio station. When Winona Ryder was on trial for shoplifting charges in 2002, The Washington Post reporter Robin Givhan took note of her girlish headbands and her prim, elegant knee-length skirts and dresses – but wondered after Ryder was convicted, “Did they sense in her an attempt at manipulative wardrobing so slick that it backfired?”

She has simultaneously telegraphed two messages that very well could have been at odds: “Look, I’m just a mum who tried to take her teenagers on a nice ski vacation,” and “Yes I am wealthy and famous, and I shan’t be wasting my time on this.”

More recently, Harvey Weinstein arrived for his 2020 trial in New York unshaven and leaning on an orthopedic walker with tennis balls affixed to the feet. “The decrepit-looking Mr. Weinstein, body hunched as he slowly rolls forward,” the New York Times’s Jasmine E. Harris observed, “contrasts sharply with his former image as a domineering Hollywood power broker now accused of rape and predatory sexual assault.” And Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, in court last year suing each other for defamation, wore sharp, tidy suits and clean-looking, off-the-face hairstyles while they traded allegations of drunken, drug-addled abuses.

So far, Paltrow’s wardrobe selections have actually emphasised that she is, in fact, someone who goes skiing and could feasibly be involved in a freak accident on the slopes; in particular, the cozy white turtleneck sweater and aviator-frame glasses she wore on Tuesday invoked ’80s apres-ski in all its glory, as depicted in 2021’s House of Gucci.