It’s been a while since Gisele Bündchen has popped up on the red carpet (since the Met Gala, in fact, when she ascended the museum steps in the bridal gown that closed Karl Lagerfeld’s spring-summer 2007 Chanel couture show). Following her divorce, Bündchen has largely been more about pura vida than pap shots: She decamped to Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula to finish up her cookbook, Nourish, due out this spring.
And yet she came out of hibernation on December 8 for a night in Miami with Swiss watchmaker IWC Schaffhausen, having signed on as the brand’s environmental & community projects adviser last year. Although the street style during Art Basel can lean…whatever the opposite of quiet luxury is, Bündchen paired her signature sun-kissed curls (cared for by BCO London’s Bernardo Vasconcelos) with a khaki shorts suit straight out of Shiv Roy’s Tribeca walk-in. Accessorized with an IWC timepiece and court shoes, it made her look polished, timeless, and like someone with both a very large Hamptons estate and an in-depth knowledge of SEC regulations.
Shorts suits have slowly but surely been making a comeback over the last 18 months, particularly in the world of menswear: See Valentino, Louis Vuitton, and Comme des Garçons’s spring-summer 2024 offerings for the boys. It’s Julia Roberts, though, who’s been flying the flag for the silhouette everywhere from Milan to London (fitting, given that her linen shorts suit in Pretty Woman is still a fashion-editor favorite 30-odd years after she wore it). Gucci’s Sabato De Sarno provided some of the actor's best: a gray shorts suit for his debut, a shell-pink version for the UK premiere of Leave the World Behind…. If 2023 was the year that fashion went pantsless, let’s hope this is sufficient inducement for the stars to finally put some (short) trousers on in 2024.
