Phoebe Bridgers and Her Leg Hair Make for a Memorable Venice Film Festival Debut

Yesterday, Phoebe Bridgers made her debut at the Venice Film Festival, where her first turn as an actor, in A24’s Primetime, was received with an enthusiastic seven-minute standing ovation and chants of “Phoebe! Phoebe!” The musician also brought a more unexpected detail to the Lido.

The singer arrived at the film’s photocall in a sharply tailored black skirt suit from Gucci’s fall 2026 collection. She accessorized with Gucci oval-frame sunglasses, Stuart Weitzman Babette pumps, and a chunky Leo Black Grandfather silver signet ring. With this sleek, controlled silhouette, her hair swept back and makeup kept soft and barely there, it was a look that reveled in the elegantly ladylike with a contemporary edge.

Her legs were left visibly unshaven beneath the abbreviated hemline—and rather than undermining the femininity of the look, unapologetic hair sharpened it. Bridgers’s multiple leg tattoos were also on show, including a tattoo of intertwined thorns and leaves and a black-ink rendering of a house that references her Punisher album.

Of course, while we don’t need to make hairy legs on a public female figure an overwrought feminist statement, exposed body hair has a storied, rebellious history on the red carpet. Julia Roberts famously raised an arm to wave at the 1999 London premiere of Notting Hill, revealing unshaven underarms and inadvertently creating one of the era’s most discussed beauty moments. Roberts has since said there was no calculated feminist agenda behind it: “I waved and people saw I had armpit hair. It was a scandal,” she recalled to Vogue years later. Sophia Loren had already eschewed shaving conventions decades earlier, while Drew Barrymore and Miley Cyrus have made underarm and leg hair a natural component of their red carpet beauty histories.

By the evening, Bridgers had switched gears to explore another spectrum of feminine-energy dressing. For the world premiere of Primetime, she joined co-stars including Robert Pattinson, Skyler Gisondo, and Merritt Wever on the carpet, where Bridgers changed into an Alexander McQueen fall 2026 floral-lace evening gown in wispy, spectral gray with diaphanous strips of fabric and a sheer bodice, adding a Cartier Nigeria ring while keeping the same Leo Black signet.

There’s a compelling throughline in Bridgers’s festival wardrobe. These are deeply feminine clothes, but worn without subscribing wholesale to a fraught idea of what feminine presentation is supposed to entail. There is romance but also abrasion, and prettiness without preciousness.

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