The Many Suits of Julia Roberts

Any color, any cut—Julia Roberts can wear the hell out of a suit. Menswear is her quintessential look for career-defining moments, from her first red-carpet appearances in the ’90s to countless premieres and awards shows she’s attended since. She’s worn so many amazing suits, in fact, that you might have missed or forgotten about a few of her greatest ’fits. (To think I nearly forgot to include the butter yellow Lafayette 148 suiting she wore on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert earlier this year.)

And now, without further ado, the many suits of Julia Roberts:

The look: It all started with the boxy Giorgio Armani suit and tie Roberts wore to the 1990 Golden Globes, where she scooped up her first major award, for her role in Steel Magnolias at age 23. Years later, in 2014, Roberts revealed to InStyle that she bought the suit off the rack. “I loved the shape of it,” she said. “For me, this was the epitome of being dressed up.” And that, dear reader, is herstory.

The following year she wore a navy pinstripe skirt suit and sheer black tights to the 48th Golden Globes, where she won again for Pretty Woman. The proportions of this look are sublime: the miniskirt, dangly turquoise earrings, and delicate brooch balance out the bulk of the double-breasted blazer’s shoulder pads.

A sorely overlooked ’fit from this era is the chocolate brown suit Roberts wore to the 1991 premiere of Hook, with then fiancé Kiefer Sutherland in tow. (They broke up three days before the wedding.) Minimal styling with nothing more than a pocket square and a couple of rings allows the tailoring to speak for itself.

But the most underrated suit in Roberts’s multiverse of menswear has to be the number she wore to the 1993 New York Film Festival with her now ex-husband country singer Lyle Lovett. (The pair married after a month of dating but parted ways amicably a couple of years later.) The wide black-and-white stripes certainly make a statement, but personally, I think the crisp white button-down peeking out from underneath is doing all the heavy lifting. A string of pearls and a sleek blowout provide the finishing touches to an objectively perfect ensemble.

Dressing in black from head to toe continues to be a major wardrobe motif for Roberts. But in the early and mid-aughts, we start to see Roberts experiment more with her suiting. I love the feminine-masculine contrast happening in this snapshot from her visit to The Late Show With David Letterman in 2003. And the white Stella McCartney suit she accessorized with a blush-colored pussy-bow blouse for the London premiere of Eat Pray Love in 2010 proves that structure and softness can coexist.

In 2018, InStyle honored Roberts’s contribution to fashion with a Style Icon Award. Roberts and her longtime stylist Elizabeth Stewart wore matching pastel suits to the event.

“If I were to take any credit, I would thank 22-year-old version of me, who wore, ad nauseam, a sort of like high-ranking naval jacket that I found at a vintage store with inexplicable black-and-white horizontal striped leggings and thought I was fantastic,” Roberts said during her acceptance speech. “For that girl, I thank you.”

This year the 54-year-old somehow managed to top herself with three incredible suits. At the Cannes Film Festival, she wore a tuxedo-inspired Louis Vuitton jumpsuit accessorized with stilettos and a 100-carat yellow diamond necklace for the Armageddon Time red carpet, followed by a Dior haute couture bar jacket paired with a tulle skirt by Maria Grazia Chiuri for the Chopard Trophy photo call. At the New York premiere of Gaslit, she opted for a three-piece Gucci suit featuring a gray double-breasted jacket, plaid shorts, and waist-cinching cummerbund.

The legacy: Julia Roberts is living proof that a suit is never just a suit. It’s a wordless declaration of power and importance. A sartorial way of saying, “Remember: You work for me.” This is especially true when suiting is draped over the shoulders of highly visible women. It felt subversive when Roberts did it in the ’90s. And it still does today when the likes of Zendaya and Kristen Stewart follow suit.

Upending gendered expectations of what celebrities should wear on the red carpet is a potent political act. When Stewart took off her heels on the Cannes Film Festival red carpet in 2018—publicly defying the festival’s unspoken requirement that women wear heels—she was invoking a fashion lineage that stretches back to Roberts and beyond. Memorably, in 2016, Roberts walked the Cannes red carpet barefoot. And in 1999 she made waves on the Notting Hill red carpet by proudly showcasing unshaved tufts of armpit hair in a sleeveless sequined shift made by Vivienne Tam.